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"My heart was beating so fast when they told me my mom was going to be with us again," he said. "When they told my brother, he started to cry."

His family is now living in Kingston, New York, as they fight their asylum claim.

"We can be a family again. We're together again and we're very happy," he said.

New court filings this month from the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law gave firsthand accounts by more than 200 migrant children and their parents from detention facilities run by Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The filings, which list the migrants' first name and last initial, are part of the ongoing battle between advocates and the government over the treatment of migrant children, based on a set of protections known as the Flores settlement and subsequent court decisions.

Peter Schey, the executive editor of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law Foundation, said the issues the group was seeing at facilities run by Customs and Border Protection were very different than those at locations run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

With regards to CBP, he said his group has seen "a substantial increase in detained children having inadequate access to potable drinking water, edible food, mats and blankets to sleep and access to basic toiletries" as well as overcrowding.

In terms of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Schey said the concerns were increases in psychotropic drugs being given to children without parental consent, children being sent to higher security facilities without a hearing or appeal process, and lengthy detention without steps being taken to release children to parents or other sponsors.

On Friday, a federal judge in Los Angeles said she would order an independent monitor to assess the conditions for children at detention centers and border processing centers under the Flores agreement, saying there was a "disconnect" between the administration's own monitors and the accounts from migrants on the ground.

The center and its partnering organizations are also asking the judge to block the facilities from administering psychotropic drugs, which they have alleged in previous court filings.

In the recent court filing, one 16-year-old boy named Sergio C. said during a mid-July interview that he had been separated from his father for about 45 days.

Authorities apprehended Sergio and his father and took away all of their belongings before separating them into two groups, he said in his statement.

The groups were then put into vehicles to be driven away, he said.

"When I left, and my dad wasn't with me, they told me not to worry that he would be coming in a moment," he said, according to testimony given in Spanish and translated into English. "I went in the car and felt very relieved and happy that he would follow. But it wasn't like that. He didn't come. I haven't seen him since then."

The Morning Rundown

He was not able to speak to his father until after he had been at Casa Padre, a shelter for migrant children in Texas, for more than a month.

"I worry about him every day and every night," he said. "I can't sleep well at all because I worry so much about my family. I have only spoken with my father a total of 20 minutes in these 45 days."

Sergio said one night he was crying in the bathroom because he did not know where his father was or how he was doing.

"A staff member here at Casa Padre came in and asked me why I was being such a crybaby," he said in Spanish, according to the filing. "Then he said some words in English that I didn't understand but other young men who were there told me he said swear words. It made me feel very bad and very ashamed."

Sergio said the last time he spoke to his father, he said his immigration case had not gone well and he was told he would have to leave the country. The two want to leave together but Sergio hasn't received any more information, he said.

"I do not want to be here anymore, especially since I know how much my father is suffering," he said. "The way I have been treated makes me feel like I don't matter, like I am trash."

Dixiana S., a 10-year-old from Honduras, said she was separated from her mother after being apprehended by authorities. The first night, there were so many young girls at the facility that they had to sleep sitting up on the concrete floor because there was no room.

"For breakfast, they gave me a frozen ham sandwich. The ham was black. I took one bite, but did not eat the rest because of the taste," she said in her statement.

"I was very scared that I would never see my mother again," she said.

She and her mother were taken to another facility known as the "dog house" for its large fenced enclosures and separated again. She and other children in the filing described getting kicked by guards to wake them up.

"I was half asleep and they were calling a girl who had a similar first name as me," she said. "A male officer kicked me to wake me up to confirm whether or not I was the person they were looking for. I was not. The kick scared me and hurt, although I did not get a bruise."

Dixiana said she could see her mother far away in another cell.

"I didn't cry the first day when I was at this facility, but I began crying all of the time on the second and third day because I missed my mother," she said. "The majority of the other girls in my cell were also crying the whole time I was there."

Dixiana said that, according to her mother, they left that facility on May 28 and have been at ICE's South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, since. At the facility she contracted chicken pox and was treated for that and an infection she had in a molar, according to her statement.

Schey said many of the children his team and other partnering organizations have interviewed showed signs of trauma and emotional distress.

"Many of them have cried, some children break down crying when conveying their stories to us," he said. "They're all suffering from anxiety, sleeplessness, nightmares many report feeling high levels of anxiety, depression, breaking out in sweats in the middle of the day."

When asked about the allegations in the filing, CBP provided a statement Thursday saying that as a matter of policy, the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

"However, lack of comment should not be construed as agreement or stipulation with any of the allegations. CBP takes all allegations seriously, and investigates all formal complaints," the statement said.

Coordinators for CBP and ICE tasked with assessing compliance under Flores at the facilities said in a June filing that they had found both agencies compliant with the Flores agreement after their assessments.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement referred comment to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to request for comment. The Office of Refugee Resettlement also did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Michelle Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women's Refugee Commission, who had interviewed a number of children for the filing, said another issue for the youngest children is that the children are not allowed to touch to comfort each other, and their toys or personal belongings are often taken from them upon apprehension.

"I talked to a 6-year-old little girl, they took her away from her mother and then as she sat there crying they took her doll," she said.

She said that while ORR shelters are "vast improvements" in what they provide over CBP detention facilities, the shelters were still not equipped to deal with young children separated from their parents versus children who actually came unaccompanied.

"We're not in this crisis in terms of number of arrivals, but they created a crisis by separating all these children," she said.

In another case, Alexander Asig-Putul, 11, was separated from his mother for 45 days after coming to the U.S. from Guatemala to seek asylum, according to the boy and his mother Otilia Asig-Putul. They were apprehended at the border in May.

"They sent me to a room with other children. I saw my mom and she was chained at her feet, her waist and her hands, and I was crying," Alexander said in Spanish from his aunt's home in Florida.

"There was another little boy who was 6 years old and he was crying because his dad was also chained. He was crying and ran to hug his dad and didn't want to let him go," he said.

Alexander, whose mother asked that his middle name be used out of concern for his privacy, said he was taken to a shelter for migrant children in Illinois run by the nonprofit Heartland Alliance.

He was placed in a room with two friends and a 14-year-old boy who frequently bullied him, he said. Alexander said he told shelter staff about the ongoing bullying, but they told him to stop complaining.

"I told them many times but they ignored me. They didn't listen to me," he said.

One night, the 14-year-old boy grabbed his foot to trip him as he was leaving the room, causing him to hit his head on a metal bed frame, causing a severe laceration and heavy bleeding, according to Alexander and a complaint filed by his mother.

"I had my hand on my head and it felt like water was falling on me and when I looked at my hand I saw it was full of blood," he said. "I was dizzy."

Heartland Alliance said in a statement to NBC News that the allegations "are troubling as they do not reflect our values or the quality of care we strive to provide."

"We immediately initiated our own investigation upon learning of these allegations over the weekend, and are reviewing any incident reports, medical records, staff disciplinary reports, examining our policies and protocols, and more," Heartland Alliance said.

Alexander was taken to the hospital and his wound was treated with three staples.The boy's mother said she was never called by the shelter and informed her son had been taken to the hospital. The two are receiving pro bono legal help and have filed a lawsuit alleging negligence against the shelter and three of its staff members.

"I was crying and my head burned," he said.

"I was desperate, I was in the hospital for four hours. I wanted my mom but I couldn't talk to her," he said.

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'Like I am trash': Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation

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"My heart was beating so fast when they told me my mom was going to be with us again," he said. "When they told my brother, he started to cry." His family is now living in Kingston, New York, as they fight their asylum claim. "We can be a family again.

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U.S. border guards took a 6-year-old Honduran boy from his mother, and ultimately returned a deeply traumatized child.

Jeremy Raff / Arsh Raziudden / The Atlantic

"I remember [Jenri] grabbing my clothes, saying, 'Mommy, I don't want them to separate us,'" Anita later told me.

Soon, Anita was shuttled to a mass trial where she was convicted of misdemeanor illegal entry and sentenced to time served. Agents falsely told her that Jenri would be returned to her after the trial, but instead she was sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Port Isabel Service Detention Center to await the first step of the asylum process, known as the "credible-fear interview." If it went well, she would receive a court date to present her asylum claim, months or even years from now. And if it didn't-if officials thought she had crossed the border for better work opportunities or family reunion or anything short of a life-and-death situation at home-she would most likely be deported. Quite possibly without Jenri.

Jodi Goodwin, a local immigration attorney, first met Anita in a conference room at the Port Isabel Service Detention Center, where she'd gathered a dozen immigrants and briefed them on the asylum process. Anita sat in the back of the meeting room, a small woman leaning her head against the wall looking so despondent she struggled to keep her eyes open. "When I first met Anita, I knew I had to focus on her case," Goodwin said.

At that point in June, more than a month into the family-separation crisis, Goodwin was spending most of her waking hours trying to represent as many mothers like Anita as she could. Each time she visited Port Isabel, she emerged from the barracks with a fresh list of desperate parents pleading for information about their children.

Around that time, Goodwin invited a group of lawyers from the East Coast to help try and reunite families at the Texas border. They were en route when, amid national and international outcry, President Donald Trump ordered the family separations to halt. He did not offer a plan to reunite those already split. When the East Coast lawyers arrived, they gathered at a restaurant called Pepe's to hammer out the ad hoc reunification plan. They would add as many names as possible to Goodwin's list of separated detainees, then create a database and try to match the parents to their kids. Goodwin sat at the end of the table looking buoyed by the support. "It's my due-process army," she told me.

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Locked up at Port Isabel, Anita had no way of knowing that Jenri was only 25 miles away, at a Department of Health and Human Services shelter in Harlingen. Their proximity made little difference to Anita because agents would not tell her where Jenri was. Three weeks into her confinement, Anita-whom I'd met through Goodwin, her lawyer-called me on the phone. "I haven't spoken to my son. I don't know how he is," she said, sounding frantic and exhausted because she could hardly sleep. She later told me, "I'd close my eyes then jolt awake seeing my son's face, because we'd never been separated before." At night, she cried in silence because to weep aloud brought reprimand from the guards.

At her credible-fear interview, Anita had told the immigration officer the story of her life back in a rural Honduran town distinguished by its Mayan ruins.

She sold fruit and cut hair on the side. She got around town by ATV, and took pride in her self-sufficiency and grit. Last year, after a severe car accident, one of her brother's arms was amputated, and Anita slept on the ground outside of the hospital to ensure he received care. But there was gang violence that made her fear for Jenri's safety. "I was threatened at gunpoint," Anita told me.

The officer found her fear of returning to Honduras convincing enough to give Anita the chance, at some later date, to make her case for asylum before a judge. But though she passed the interview, ICE abruptly denied Anita bond, which meant she would remain in custody, possibly for months. She would have no opportunity to search for Jenri.

Goodwin was outraged. After more than 20 years working inside Port Isabel, she knew the ICE agents well. "I mean, we're neighbors, we go to the same churches, the same baseball teams," she said. "That's just the way of life down here." It's part of the reason why she was able to exert a surprising amount of pressure on the officers when their dreaded bureaucracy did something that defied logic-like denying Anita bond.

When Goodwin found out what had happened, she called a deportation officer to protest. With a bond, Anita could leave detention and reclaim Jenri. "This is bullshit," Goodwin told the deportation officer, "to continue to cause prolonged trauma to a fucking 5-year-old." She got a supervisor on the phone, and he reversed ICE's decision. After a month behind bars, Anita was released.

I met Anita in front of the Port Isabel Service Detention Center that night in mid-July. Before the car even cleared the property line, she had borrowed a cell phone to call a number for Jenri's social worker, seeking information. "I got out of there," she said, welling up with tears, "but all I want is to see my son."

Goodwin met Anita later on at the La Posada Providencia immigrant shelter in San Benito to plan their attempt to pick up Jenri. Through her connections, Goodwin had figured out that he had been taken to the HHS shelter in Harlingen. Despite a federal judge's order to return children as quickly as possible, other migrant moms were being turned away from similar facilities in the area after brief visits with their children. Activists purchased tents and planned to help parents camp in front of government shelters and create a media spectacle meant to pressure the government. Goodwin asked Anita if she was prepared for such measures if officials declined to return Jenri. "Yes," she said, without hesitation.

The next morning, Anita was sweating despite the air conditioning. It had been one month almost to the day since she had seen her son. Meanwhile, at her office, Goodwin called and emailed HHS officials urging them to release Jenri that afternoon.

When Goodwin and Anita arrived in Harlingen, they were led inside the shelter without incident. Goodwin said that employees emphasized how well they had treated Jenri, "saying positive things like, 'You played a lot here, right papa? You learned your numbers here, right papa?'" Jenri was seated on a chair in a drab room. Anita "tried to give him a hug," Goodwin recalled, but he did not respond at first. Anita knelt on the floor in front of him and looked in his eyes. "She asked for forgiveness," Goodwin said, "' Perdóname, perdóname, perdóname. ' It was awful."

Later that day, back at La Posada Providencia, Jenri seemed fine. He petted the dogs, climbed the playscape, and ate fried fish at dinner. But by evening, his ordeal had begun to surface. In one of the dorm-style cottages, Anita packed a duffel bag for their flight the next morning to Charlotte, North Carolina. Sister Margaret Mertens, a 20-year veteran of the shelter, arrived with some donated clothes they could take with them to their new home, where Jenri's father worked as a construction worker. Jenri, in a hyperactive mood, climbed the bunk beds, yanked on the ceiling fans, and reached for the wall-mounted television. "No, no, honey," Sister Margaret said. "Don't touch that." The reprimand seemed to bring Jenri's month in government custody rushing back. "No touching!" Jenri said. "No touch!"

Because he does not speak English, I asked him in Spanish where he had learned the phrase. "Over there, where I was," he replied. Inside the government shelters like the one where Jenri was detained, kids are reportedly barred from touching even their own siblings, depriving them of an essential way to soothe themselves in crisis.

Jenri began to perseverate on the phrase. He screamed "No touch!" again and again. Then, he threw himself face down on the bed and yelled at Anita through tears. "Just take me back to jail," he cried. "You're not my mom anymore."

When he finally fell asleep, Anita stood in the darkness outside."The separation was so long." she said. "My son has changed so much."

The trauma of separation "can disrupt the architecture of a child's brain," explained Julie Linton, a co-chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Immigrant Health Special Interest Group. Prolonged separation weaponizes a child's fight-or-flight response, elongating it into toxic stress that can damage health in both the short and long term, she said. Sometimes children "hear a specific phrase or comment that triggers a traumatic event," Linton added, which can touch off exaggerated or unusual responses. Jenri's cascading anger later that night was "consistent with experience of trauma," Linton said.

The day after Anita and Jenri were reunited, they boarded the jet for Charlotte. It was the first time either had ever flown. For a moment, they seemed to leave the experience of separation behind. Jenri marveled that he was "above the clouds," and Anita said, "See the river? Remember when we crossed the river?"

Weeks later, living in a clean, modest group home in a nice neighborhood, Jenri continues to exhibit disturbing behavior. When Anita took him to Walmart for a belated birthday present-he turned 6 in government custody-he threw himself on the floor crying and she had to carry him out of the store. He feared starting school because he thought he was being separated again. Now when another child tries to share his toys, he is firm: "No touching."

Still, they celebrated being together again as Jenri started public school, in America. Anita has no idea what will happen at her asylum hearing, or when it will take place. But Jenri is with her, and his father. The worst, it seemed, was behind them, which meant they were among the lucky ones.

As of last week, more than a month after the court-ordered deadline to reunify all the families, about 500 children remained separated from their parents.

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'The Separation Was So Long. My Son Has Changed So Much.'

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U.S. border guards took a 6-year-old Honduran boy from his mother, and ultimately returned a deeply traumatized child. "I remember [Jenri] grabbing my clothes, saying, 'Mommy, I don't want them to separate us,'" Anita later told me. Soon, Anita was shuttled to a mass trial where she was convicted of misdemeanor illegal entry and sentenced to time served.

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Scared, Filomena clung to him, Nazario said in his declaration. And then: "Two Border Patrol Agents grabbed her out of my arms. ... My daughter was screaming and crying. And so was I."

Officials with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

' Two Border Patrol Agents grabbed her out of my arms. ... My daughter was screaming and crying. And so was I.' Nazario, who fled to the U.S. with his daughter, Filomena

Nazario said the agents told him he would be in jail for two or three days and then would be returned to his daughter, who would stay at the Border Patrol station. But that's not what happened at all.
Caught in the Policy Crossfire
Nazario and his daughter walked into the United States in the midst of a dramatic reworking of how this country handles unauthorized immigrants -- including those seeking asylum and those traveling with children. Thousands of children like Filomena have been removed from their parents and placed into a confusing system of institutional care that is stretched beyond its maximum capacity. Government directives have shifted repeatedly in recent days, leading to confusion and lack of communication among agencies.

For Nazario and Filomena, the result is utter bewilderment and pain.

Here are some of the recent developments:

April 6 -- Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero tolerance policy of criminally prosecuting everyone caught unlawfully crossing into the U.S.

May 7 -- Sessions held a press conference with ICE acting director Thomas Homan at the border fence in San Diego, and said, "If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law."

June 20 -- Last Wednesday, after an outcry over family separation, President Trump signed an executive order stating that the government's policy is now to keep unauthorized immigrant families together, "where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources."

June 21 -- The following day, a senior Customs and Border Protection official told the Washington Post that, in order to promote family unity, the agency would stop referring migrant parents for prosecution if they were traveling with children. The Department of Justice asserted that the zero tolerance prosecution policy still applied to everyone.

June 23 -- On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a fact sheet describing steps it was taking to reunite children with their parents. The memo said 522 children had been returned to parents by Customs and Border Protection. And, it said, an additional 2,053 "separated" children were in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for "unaccompanied alien children," now including those, like Filomena, who were taken from their parents. The memo does not provide a timeline for the reunifications, and what will happen to the children remains uncertain.

A Tough Choice

Back in their mountain village in Guatemala, Filomena used to go just about everywhere with her Papi. When he went to the fields to hoe the potatoes, Filomena went, too. And together they would go home to her mother and 2-year-old brother. She liked to play, and to write and draw in her notebook, said Filomena's mother, Marcela, who spoke to KQED by phone.

Then a local gang began to menace Nazario. They tried to extort money from him and threatened murder, Marcela said. The Guatemalan government is weak and, after years of civil war and economic hardship, more young men are drawn to gangs and commit violence with impunity. The threat is growing, even in rural areas. Nazario felt he had to escape. He had relatives in California. Maybe he could find refuge there. Worried that Marcela would have difficulty managing the farm with two small children, the couple agreed Nazario would take his daughter with him.

After Nazario had gone, Marcela said the gang members returned, looking for him. They beat her up, she said, but "at least they didn't kill me."

A Complicated Legal Maze

In San Diego, Nazario was held by the U.S. Marshals Service while his criminal trial went forward. He spent two weeks locked in a detention facility run by the Geo Group, a private prison company contracted by the government. Because he was a criminal defendant, the government appointed him a public defender. (In immigration matters, however, neither he nor Filomena was entitled to appointed counsel. Many immigrants appear in court without a lawyer.) The authorities never told him where his daughter was.

When federal public defender James Chavez first met with Nazario, he spent a long time trying to explain the complex U.S. system, with its criminal and immigration proceedings. The Guatemalan man found it very confusing.

"Nazario is an individual without any formal education," said Chavez. "I'm not confident that he fully understood what happened to him. And that's not uncommon."

What Nazario did understand was that his daughter was gone from him. He told the lawyer he cried nearly every day.

Chavez began to search, with the help of the ACLU and the Guatemalan Consulate. It took 10 days before he located Filomena. She had been put in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, known as ORR, and transferred to New York.

"I do not know where New York is. I was told it was very far," Nazario said in his declaration.

Chavez said he spoke with a kindhearted ORR caseworker who had met with Filomena.

"She just described a little girl who was crying every day, who was missing her father very much," he said. "Which parallels him crying every day, missing his little girl."

' I'm desperate. I don't know where she is. I don't know what that place is like. I still don't know how she is. So I feel desperate. I feel sad every day.' Marcela, Filomena's mother

Officials with ORR did not respond to repeated requests for comment. And Chavez did not want to divulge exactly where Filomena was staying, for fear of jeopardizing her quick release. But most very young children in ORR custody are housed in foster homes, rather than institutional shelters, according to Anthony Enriquez, director of the unaccompanied minors program at Catholic Charities of New York. Foster families are hired by the nonprofit agencies that contract with ORR to care for the children.

It can take as much as 10 days before Catholic Charities staff can communicate with kids in ORR custody, said Enriquez. Once they do, he and his staff work with ORR case managers to establish contact between children and their parents. Filomena was able to speak to her mother about three weeks ago.

Marcela said her little girl told her she did not want to be where she was. She wanted to be back home with her family.

"I'm desperate," said Marcela in Spanish. "I don't know where she is. I don't know what that place is like. I still don't know how she is. So I feel desperate. I feel sad every day."

In New York, the Catholic Charities lawyers are scrambling to get the children's cases before a judge in the notoriously overburdened immigration courts. If they succeed in getting a case onto an expedited docket, it can be heard in one to two weeks, said Enriquez.

"As dedicated lawyers, we're trying to move this as fast as possible," he said. "The longer children are separated, the greater the risk of psychological damage."

But because the immigration court process for children has more protections, it can take longer. All unaccompanied children, including those like Filomena who were rendered unaccompanied, are entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge. By contrast, adults like Nazario are subject to a summary deportation, called expedited removal. Recent border crossers are entitled to see an immigration judge only if an asylum officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services finds they have a credible fear of persecution in their home country.

In order to get separated children back to their parents more quickly, Enriquez said, Catholic Charities lawyers are now requesting that judges ask ICE prosecutors to withdraw their cases. This allows the court to release the child to be returned home. Enriquez said he and other lawyers are also using the court proceeding to hold the government accountable: "We can always say, 'Your Honor, you should ask the government lawyer: Where is the parent? Why has this child been separated? Why is there not a system to reunify the family before deportation? Why can't the government facilitate more communication?'"

Giving Up on Protection in the U.S.

Back in San Diego, Nazario remained distraught. In spite of the danger that propelled him north, he decided to abandon his asylum claim. If he had pursued asylum he would likely have been locked up for months or even years -- without Filomena.

In his declaration he said: "After being in jail for two weeks and having my daughter taken away from me, I decided that the United States is not a place that would protect me."

On May 30, he pleaded guilty to illegal entry in criminal court and was sentenced to time served. His hope was that if he accepted deportation by immigration authorities, he would be reunited with his child.

Then federal marshals handed Nazario over to ICE, which took him to a different private prison in San Diego just for people in immigration proceedings -- the Otay Mesa Detention Center, run by a company called CoreCivic. His lawyer said it took a couple more weeks before an ICE agent came to talk to Nazario about his asylum claim and his decision to give it up.

"My impression of Nazario is that he was deeply depressed, maybe even broken," said public defender Chavez, who met with Nazario five or six times while he was jailed in San Diego, visiting even after the criminal case had been resolved.

Finally, on June 19, ICE transferred Nazario to Arizona. And on June 20, the very same day that President Trump reversed his stance on separating families, Nazario was flown back to Guatemala City. Filomena was not with him.

In the five weeks Nazario spent in U.S. government custody, he was never once able to speak to Filomena. He didn't have money for a jail phone call. And James Chavez, juggling the legal demands of many other cases, couldn't make it happen.

But Chavez said that Nazario's case was the most disturbing he'd had in a decade as a federal defender. And he wasn't willing to let it go.

"This case has touched me personally, being a father of two small children myself and having gotten to know a good man who's going through a real nightmare," he said. "Just as a fellow human being, I want to make sure I do everything I can to help him be reunited with his young daughter."

So he said he'll keep working with the Guatemalan Consulate and the immigration lawyers in New York, to get Filomena sent safely back to Guatemala. It could take weeks.

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One Migrant Family's Story of Separation at the Border

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Scared, Filomena clung to him, Nazario said in his declaration. And then: "Two Border Patrol Agents grabbed her out of my arms. ... My daughter was screaming and crying. And so was I." Officials with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

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An autopsy report has revealed that a 7-year-old girl who migrated to the United States from Guatemala died from a bacterial infection known as streptococcal sepsis while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Jakelin Caal Maquin had traveled to the U.S. with her father 2,000 miles from northern Guatemala. She died in December, two days after they were detained by border officials. By the time Jakelin was transported to a children's hospital in El Paso, Texas, she was vomiting, having seizures and had difficulty breathing.

The medical examiner's office in El Paso released its autopsy report on Fridayshowing that streptococcus bacteria was found in the girl's lungs, adrenal gland, liver and spleen. The report says the infection led to the failure of multiple organs.

Jakelin's death has underscored the dangers migrants face when traveling to the U.S. and added to the criticism of the conditions they can experience while in U.S. custody.

"When Jakelin Caal Maquin presented to the Border Patrol facility in New Mexico, there was no specific review of experiences, signs or symptoms that would have identified that she was sick," said Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., in an interview with NPR. "There was no physical examination including a very basic vital signs that would have most likely identified that she had a fever ... or a fast heart rate."

According to The New York Times, several physicians who reviewed the autopsy report said Jakelin "would have been visibly sick for many hours."

"Something definitely went wrong and is wrong with our system, that we need to correct by creating a set of humanitarian standards that the CBP must abide by which would include a meaningful health screening, a meaningful coordination with health trained providers that can give guidance and the care that is needed," Ruiz said.

When contacted for comment, the CBP referred NPR to a Dec. 14 statement on Jakelin's death. The statement reads:

"Border Patrol Agents, including trained Emergency Medical Technicians did everything in their power to provide emergency medical assistance for Jakelin Caal Maquin immediately after her father notified the agents of her distress at a remote Forward Operating Base, 94 miles from the nearest Border Patrol Station ... Despite our trained EMT agents' best efforts fighting for Jakelin's life, and the work of the Hidalgo County and Providence Children's Hospital medical teams treating her, we were unable to rescue her."

According to the Times and CNN, lawyers for Jakelin's family are calling for an independent investigation. Ruiz told NPR that conditions in migrant shelters are "petri dishes for people to get sick."

Ruiz told NPR that the shelters he visited in New Mexico after Jakelin's death had no baby food or formula or appropriate food for elderly people. Migrants would have to request water, and sometimes were not given the sufficient amount of water per day, Ruiz said. Many in the shelters were not able to sleep, he added, saying the shelters contained "children laying on concrete floors, in very, very cold rooms, with the lights on all night, and being interrupted with loud noise, throughout the night."

"The CBP was not created to address the humanitarian needs of families who are legally seeking asylum in our country," Ruiz said, "and therefore the conditions that the women, infants, toddlers, elderly, find themselves are subhuman."

CNN reports Jakelin's father has requested a "credible fear interview," which is granted for people who have been "persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of your race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion if returned to your country."

After her death in December, Jakelin's body was returned to the indigenous community of Raxruha in Guatemala, where she was from.

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Autopsy For 7-Year-Old Migrant Who Died In U.S. Custody Shows She Died Of Sepsis

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An autopsy report has revealed that a 7-year-old girl who migrated to the United States from Guatemala died from a bacterial infection known as streptococcal sepsis while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Jakelin Caal Maquin had traveled to the U.S. with her father 2,000 miles from northern Guatemala.

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The logic may seem backward, but it worked. For years, being publicly out and outspoken as an undocumented person could serve as a kind of shield.

The undocumented-youth movement built its political power in part by turning the act of declaring one's immigration status publicly into a form of resistance as well as a personal defense. During the Obama years, an undocumented person nabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement could rally their community around them, involve lawmakers in their campaigns, and shame the federal government into approving their release. Under President Barack Obama, this kind of righteous truth-telling was a powerful tool.

Under President Donald Trump, ICE now appears determined to put those years behind it. Increasingly, ICE seems intent on proving that there is no safety for undocumented immigrants anywhere-not in the shadows and not in the spotlight.

This week, longtime New York immigrant-rights activist Jean Montrevil, who had lived in the US for 31 years and was arrested just a week prior, was deported to Haiti. On Thursday, Ravi Ragbir, a leader alongside Montrevil with New York City's New Sanctuary Movement, was transferred back to the New York area from Miami after ICE took him into custody during a check-in on January 11. Ragbir, like Montrevil, has been fighting a deportation order pegged to old criminal convictions, and has been an outspoken leader in New York City for immigrants in similar situations.

Also on January 11, ICE pulled over and arrested Eliseo Jurado, the husband of Ingrid Encalada Latorre, a Peruvian woman who has taken sanctuary in a church in Boulder, Colorado. This string of recent arrests prompted another immigrant-rights leader to come forward. On Tuesday, the longtime Seattle-based immigrant-rights activist Maru Mora Villalpando went public with details of ICE's enforcement against her. On December 20 she received in the mail what's known as a notice to appear. This document, sent by the Department of Homeland Security, signals the beginning of deportation proceedings that the federal government intends to pursue against Mora Villalpando.

"This is the first time I've ever heard from immigration," Mora Villalpando told The Nation. The timing, for the 47-year-old activist, is no coincidence. Both Ragbir and Montrevil had old convictions in their records that they'd been fighting for years. "What happened with Ravi and Jean and the others, I think ICE could excuse the fact that they were already in deportation proceedings, and they knew of them because of some legal interaction with ICE."

"My case makes it clear that this is a targeting of people who have decided to be outspoken," said Mora Villalpando, who has never received a deportation order and says her criminal record is clean. "I only have traffic tickets in my life, and that's that."

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ICE denies that these enforcement actions are politically motivated. "ICE focuses its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security," ICE spokesperson Lori Haley said. "However, as ICE leadership has made clear, ICE will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement."

Rachael Yong Yow, a spokesperson for the New York offices of ICE, sent a similarly worded response when asked about Ragbir and Montrevil's detainment.

The executive orders that Trump signed in his first days in office demonstrate that even people like Mora Villalpando, undocumented immigrants with squeaky-clean criminal records, will now become targets for enforcement. Indeed, the majority of people swept up in enforcement sweeps targeted at gang members in late 2017 had no criminal record at all. In that way, Mora Villalpando is not unique. Everyone is now on notice.

Jurado, the husband of Latorre, was pulling out of his driveway at home in Denver last Thursday when he spotted two unmarked trucks following him out of his neighborhood, said Jennifer Piper, the Denver-based interfaith organizing director with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker social-justice organization. The trucks flagged him down and Jurado pulled into a Safeway parking lot, where six ICE agents jumped out of the cars and arrested him. He's currently being held in a for-profit detention center in Aurora, Colorado.

Latorre, who has spent more than a year in sanctuary in various churches around Colorado, has become an outspoken figure in the Colorado immigrant community. She's currently in sanctuary at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Boulder with the couple's two children. "Eliseo wrote letters in support for Ingrid, he was at all of her hearings, and a lot of her documents about her financial situation include him," Piper said. For Latorre and the family's supporters, Jurado's arrest feels retaliatory.

ICE denies that Jurado's arrest was politically motivated. But, an ICE field office director, Jeffrey Lynch, acknowledged, "ICE targeted Eliseo Jurado-Fernandez for arrest after he came to ICE's attention during an investigation into his spouse, Ingrid Encalada Latorre."

For Latorre and her family, this distinction that ICE wants to make is meaningless.

"It really bothers me that immigration chose to attack Eliseo to get to me," Latorre told The Nation. "There was no reason for them to go after him other than to get to me. Eliseo had never had any contact with immigration in the time we've been together." Jurado, ICE explicitly pointed out and Latorre confirmed, had been convicted of driving under the influence over a decade ago.

Latorre is firm in her belief that her husband's arrest is an ICE "harassment tactic," and that every enforcement decision is deeply political. Related Articles

While Trump and his administration are fond of rhetoric that paints immigrants with a broad brush, conflating foreignness with criminality, Trump himself has taken time to single out immigrants with criminal records who supposedly represent the most serious threat to US national security. Gang members, those wanted for homicide, or people facing serious criminal charges, are the people Trump supposedly most wants to remove from the country.

The reality is that it's people like Ragbir, Montrevil, Latorre, Jurado, and Mora Villalpando, activists though they are, who have become the true targets. While they may now be new targets of the administration, they are among many who've been swept up by the administration's stepped-up raids, sweeps, and enforcement actions in recent weeks. ICE is planning on arresting 1,500 people in upcoming raids in Northern California, the San Francisco Chronicle reported this week. ICE acting director Thomas Homan said in December that he wants to see a quadruple increase of workplace raids (like the recent raids on 7-Eleven stores nationwide, which netted 21 people for the agency's arrest numbers.)

That doesn't mean that ICE isn't also using high-profile arrests to send messages to the immigrant community.

Mora Villalpando said she first had a sense of changes to come last spring, when ICE tracked down and arrested Daniela Vargas, a young undocumented immigrant from Mississippi, immediately after she finished speaking at a press conference after her family home was raided. At the press conference Vargas recalled waking up in her family's home when ICE knocked on the door and arrested her father and brothers as they were on their way to work.

Vargas, whose DACA status had recently expired, feared for her own safety, and barricaded herself inside a closet while making frantic phone calls to her network of allies and community leaders. ICE surrounded her house for hours, and even gained entry to the home, but by then members from the local immigrant-rights community had shown up outside too. Eventually ICE agents relented, but not before threatening Vargas and telling her they'd come back for her.

A week later, ICE agents found her again, and arrested her. She was eventually released from ICE custody after days of public outcry, but for immigrant leaders, a message had been sent. "That was a sign of things to come," Mora Villalpando said.

Mora Villalpando notes that the union representing ICE officers endorsed Trump as a candidate. "Now he's president and now that ICE has been given free rein they're using it," she said. "It's not about priority for enforcement this, priority for enforcement that. They're using their power to silence our movement."

Coming out as undocumented to seek safety in publicity may not offer the kind of protection it once did, Amy Gottlieb said. Gottlieb, who is married to Ragbir and is an immigration attorney herself, was with Ragbir when he was detained last week.

"I didn't think that before, but with what we've seen in the last week, it's a mixed bag," Gottlieb said. She said she thinks that ICE's recent actions may change people's personal calculus about coming out, even as it's already forced the immigrant-rights movement to consider new political strategies.

Still, a fight waged in public may remain the safer bet. Ragbir and this collection of other activist colleagues may now be new targets of the administration, but they do have something most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country do not. Unlike unconnected everyday undocumented immigrants, Vargas, Ragbir, Montrevil, Jurado, and Mora Villalpando were able to immediately mobilize their networks of allies, which include organizers, attorneys, faith leaders, and lawmakers, to fight on their behalf. Within minutes of Ragbir's arrest on Thursday, a protest formed on the steps of the ICE office where he was taken. Eighteen people were arrested, including multiple New York City Council members.

This moment is changing, though, and the old political script seems to have less power. Organizers are already grappling with what the new political strategy ought to look like.

At this moment, Gottlieb is focused on fighting for her family. "I can't put myself inside the mind of an ICE officer and find what their motivation is for doing something. I can say their ultimate impact is pure devastation."

"I'm in an empty apartment right now," Gottlieb said on Wednesday night. "And I don't know when Ravi is coming home."

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ICE Is Going After People Who Were Once Off-Limits

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The logic may seem backward, but it worked. For years, being publicly out and outspoken as an undocumented person could serve as a kind of shield. The undocumented-youth movement built its political power in part by turning the act of declaring one's immigration status publicly into a form of resistance as well as a personal defense.

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So you're at work one day and you're talking to your colleagues in that professional, polite, kind of buttoned-up voice that people use when they're doing professional work stuff.

Your mom or your friend or your partner calls on the phone and you answer. And without thinking, you start talking to them in an entirely different voice - still distinctly your voice, but a certain kind of your voice less suited for the office. You drop the g's at the end of your verbs. Your previously undetectable accent - your easy Southern drawl or your sing-songy Caribbean lilt or your Spanish-inflected vowels or your New Yawker - is suddenly turned way, way up. You rush your mom or whomever off the phone in some less formal syntax ("Yo, I'mma holler at you later,"), hang up and get back to work.

Then you look up and you see your co-workers looking at you and wondering who the hell you'd morphed into for the last few minutes. That right there? That's what it means to code-switch.

You're looking at the launch of a new team covering race, ethnicity and culture at NPR. We decided to call this team Code Switch because much of what we'll be exploring are the different spaces we each inhabit and the tensions of trying to navigate between them. In one sense, code-switching is about dialogue that spans cultures. It evokes the conversation we want to have here.

Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we're looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities - sometimes within a single interaction.

When you're attuned to the phenomenon of code-switching, you start to see it everywhere, and you begin to see the way race, ethnicity and culture plays out all over the place.

You see it in the political world. In January 2009, then-President-elect Obama went to Ben's Chili Bowl, a famous eatery in a historically black D.C. neighborhood. When the (black) cashier asks him if he needs change, Obama replies, "nah, we straight."

(You also might have peeped the gif of President Obama offering a conventional handshake to a white assistant coach for USA's Olympic basketball team before immediately dapping up Kevin Durant, one of the team's stars, and greeting him with "My man!" )

You see code-switching in parenting. The blog SpanglishBaby is run by two mothers who are trying to raise their kids to be fluent in both Spanish and English. Among the concerns they address: " Is Your Bilingual Kid Mixing Languages?" When you watch young multilingual kids code-switching between three languages, it looks almost like a superpower:

(A little closer to home: I knew growing up that if my mom answered the phone and used her professional voice that she was probably talking to a stranger, that it was an adult, and that if she were doing this while looking in my direction, I was probably in trouble for something.)

And of course, you see code-switching all over pop culture. In February, the famously opaque Beyoncé released an HBO documentary that promised her fans never-before-seen access to her life, and proceeded to spend most of it talking in pop-star platitudes while remaining her inscrutable self.

But in a candid video that wasn't part of that doc, we see Beyoncé at a pool hall talking trash to one of her friends whom she just whooped in a game. It gives us a quick glimpse at a different Beyoncé - silly, unrehearsed, a little mischievous. She seemed like she could be your cool-ass cousin (albeit your cool-ass cousin with washboard abs and a flawless smile).

Both those personas are the "real Beyoncé," the same way that you're still you when you're sending an e-mail to your boss that's full of jargon and with proper capitalization and when you're texting to your best friend in lowercase acronyms. Talk in one setting in a tone that's best suited for another, and you might play yourself; it would be ridiculous if she were pop-star Beyoncé in the pool hall. (But it would be kind of dope to see Bey strut into a pool hall in six-inch heels, a sequined minidress, and a wind machine like, "I am Beyoncé and I am here to pool.")

The point is, code-switching is apparent in all the myriad ways we interact with one another and try to feel each other out. Check out this Key & Peele sketch, which gets at the nuances and tensions of code-switching more eloquently than we could say:

Welcome to Code Switch.
By the way: All this week we'll be looking for your best and worst stories about code-switching. Have stories about secretly learning Farsi so you can eavesdrop on your in-laws? Or maybe in that first year of college, when you had a crush on that dude from Atlanta, you suddenly picked up a real thick drawl you previously didn't have whenever you were around him. Drop your stories in the comments, or share them with us directly. Thanks!

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The way we mix languages and speech patterns is an apt metaphor for the way race, ethnicity and culture intersect in our lives. Introducing our new blog, Code Switch.

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Guilt Trip

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Guilt will never make the grade as an A-list emotion. No one has ever written a sonnet or a power ballad about how they haven't called their mother in over a week and their expensive-bought-off-QVC exercise bike is being used to dry their underwear. Yet somehow, this peevish little C-lister of the emotional spectrum manages to punch way above its weight.

Guilt is an heirloom emotion, a moth-ridden quilt that no one can quite bring themselves to throw out.

It is so powerful, we do almost anything to avoid it. Guilt is the driver of our internal system of checks and balances, the stubborn little inner voice that stops us from eating 19 Twinkies in a row or telling our neighbor's husband that his story about the company team-building session wasn't funny the first time. Its specter is what drives the midnight diaper change (those who say that the urge to run to a child squirming in its own feces at 3 a.m. is brought about by adoration have probably never had children). We need guilt, that dreary engine of morality, in order for society to function. Without its looming prospect, we would turn into sociopaths. Or politicians. Guilt is our inner police force, but if we give it too much emotional power, we risk turning into a police state.

Mine is a genetically robust guilt, drawn from two totally distinct self-flagellating ethnicities. On my mother's side I'm heir to the good all-American thrifty mend-and-make-do Protestant guilt, a quiet, solid, looming presence. Down the paternal line, I got the kvetchy, overthinking, neurotic Jewish variety. The combination is lethal, and as I hurtle toward the end of my 30s, my guilt has gone rogue. The once mild-mannered voice of my conscience is turning nasty. Jiminy Cricket is morphing into Timothy McVeigh.

Like many women, I have the capacity to feel guilty about almost anything. There's the basic glossy-magazine guilt package - the fiendishly complicated skin-care regimens and man-pleasing instructions, the bikini bodies and never to-be-cooked recipes that give rise to them. These provide the background hum of failure.

The specifics cut deeper. I feel guilty that I almost certainly hurt my mother-in-law's feelings when I said that thing on the phone to her the other day. I feel guilty that it has taken me three weeks to respond to my best friend's supportive and lovely e-mail. I feel guilty that I throw my recycling in the regular trash when no one is looking and that one of my son's earliest two-word speech combinations was "Mommy's wine." Most of all, I feel a crippling self-loathing that I am wasting time worrying about any of this self-indulgent nonsense when right now there are children starving in Africa.

Such is the awe-inspiring flexibility of the guilt muscle; it can be activated by any given action and also it's exact opposite. Hence I can spend a week at home with my son, feeling guilty that I am neglecting work and haven't written a single word, that I am letting down my editors and myself and failing to make use of the education my parents worked so hard to provide. Yet now as I type, the guilt bubbles up for the fact that my son is languishing in day care, while I am busy not appreciating the minute-by-minute wonderama that is his precious early childhood.

But my main wellspring of guilt, reinforced daily, comes from the fact that just over a year ago, my husband and I moved to the United States from our home in London, taking our baby son with us. Or put another way, just over a year ago, my husband and I ripped the precious only grandchild from the bosom of his grandparents to chase a selfish pipe dream over 5,000 miles away.

When you live abroad, no matter how often you call home, you will fall victim to the preordained certainty that you will Not Call Home Often Enough. But the guilt that comes from not calling your mother is the bunny-slopes stuff. For the more experienced player in the guilt game, there is actually calling your mother.

Mother: "Ruth, Hi! What a surprise." (Surprise is the trigger word. It means means I don't call enough.) "How are you?" (The emphasis on the "are" suggests that the correct answer is at least an hour's worth of heartwarming anecdotes. The correct answer is not a sullen "fine.")

Me: (sullen, slightly petulant): "Fine." (immediate self-reproach)
My son lets out a long piercing, mother-shaming wail from the next room. The cause: he wants to watch "Barney's Preschool Hootenanny" on Netflix.
Mother: "Oh, dear." (pause) "Is he ill?"

I hang up the phone having both failed to deliver the heart-to-heart my mother craves, and having proved myself a Bad Parent in her eyes. The guilt ricochets like a billiard ball in my chest all day. This is the self-feeding monster technically known as "compound guilt" and given time, it can flourish with almost no prompting.

My mother usually hasn't said a single word that could reasonably make me feel this way. She doesn't need to. Grandparents in general are highly skilled at the ancient art of guilt transmission, and she need not even raise an unseen eyebrow on the other end of the line to communicate fully the wrongness of my life choices. Microscopic disapproval signs, not visible to the naked eye are transmitted directly to the guilt gland in an elaborate feedback loop, leading to instant incapacitating self-reproach.

My mother would probably hate the idea that talking to her makes me feel this way. It would almost certainly make her feel crippling guilt in turn. For guilt is an heirloom emotion, a moth-ridden quilt that no one can quite bring themselves to throw out. It bonds us together, a glue more powerful than the family dinner table . My mother makes me feel guilty because her mother made her feel guilty. We will probably continue to transmit our guilt down the generations until our great-great-great-grandchildren jump in their spaceships and flee the planet. When they do, they'll almost certainly be made to feel guilty about it.

Much as I want to spare my own son the burden in theory, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't want to throw a little guilt his way - at least enough for him to choose the nice nursing home for me when the time comes - the one with the bar and the bingo rather than the one with the urine smell and the Bible readings.

Not that it will work. Guilt is usually pretty ineffective over all. Despite its lofty claims to stand in the way of wrongdoing, guilt is really just closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. It also allows us the luxury of hedging our moral bets. Instead of making a choice and standing by the consequences, we behave as we please and then cash in our moral credits by feeling bad about it afterward.

As long as we have guilt as a comfortable fallback position, we fail to take full responsibility for our choices and actions. A wise friend once told me that she felt no "lifestyle"' guilt. In her world, guilt is reserved for true wrongdoing, otherwise, she wastes no time churning over her basic life choices or failure to live up to impossible ideals. Personally, I see this as a skill as rarefied and impressive as a talent for cryptic crosswords or competitive gymnastics. I'd love to pass that level of emotional sanity onto my children. In theory, that is. As long as they call their mother once in awhile.

( Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com. Unfortunately, we can notify only writers whose articles have been accepted for publication.)

Ruth Whippman is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and The Huffington Post, and she is a regular blogger for The Independent. Follow her on Twitter at @ruthwhippman.

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Guilt will never make the grade as an A-list emotion. No one has ever written a sonnet or a power ballad about how they haven't called their mother in over a week and their expensive-bought-off-QVC exercise bike is being used to dry their underwear.

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In an earlier article, I talked about child neglect (known as an "act of omission".) On the other end of the spectrum of child abuse is physical abuse, an act of commission.

According to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services statistics for 2006, approximately 905,000 U.S. children were found to have been maltreated that year, with 16% of them reported as physically abused (the remainder having suffered sexual abuse or neglect.) ¹ In other studies, it's been noted that approximately 14-43% of children have experienced at least one traumatic abusive event prior to adulthood. ² And according to The American Humane Association (AHA), an estimated 1,460 children died in 2005 of abuse and neglect. ³

How is child abuse defined?

The AHA defines physical child abuse as "non-accidental trauma or physical injury caused by punching, beating, kicking, biting, burning or otherwise harming a child." ³ However, it can be challenging to draw the line between physical discipline and child abuse. When does corporal punishment cease to be a style of parenting and become an abusive behavior that is potentially traumatizing for its child victims in the long-term?

A recent episode of the popular television show Dr. Phil featured a woman whose extreme disciplinarian tactics later resulted in her arrest and prosecution for child abuse. A featured video showed her forcing her young adopted son to hold hot sauce in his mouth and take a cold shower as punishment for lying. Audience members were horrified-as was Dr. Phil-but the woman insisted that she couldn't find a better way to control her child. Many child abusers are not aware when their behavior becomes harmful to a child or how to deal with their own overwhelm before they lose their tempers.

At its core, any type of abuse of children constitutes exploitation of the child's dependence on and attachment to the parent.

Another therapeutic term that is used in conjunction with child abuse is "interpersonal victimization." According to the book Childhood victimization: violence, crime, and abuse in the lives of young people by David Finkelhor, interpersonal victimization can be defined as "...harm that comes to individuals because other human[s] have behaved in ways that violate social norms." ⁵ This sets all forms of abuse apart from other types of trauma-causing-victimization like illness, accidents, and natural disasters.

Finkelhor goes on to explain: "Child victimizations do not fit neatly into conventional crime categories. While children suffer all the crimes that adults do, many of the violent and deviant behaviors engaged in by human[s] to harm children have ambiguous status as crimes. The physical abuse of children, although technically criminal, is not frequently prosecuted and is generally handled by social-control agencies other than the police and criminal courts. " ⁵

What happens to abused children?

In some cases-depending on the number of reports made, the severity of the abuse, and the available community resources-children may be separated from their parents and grow up in group homes or foster care situations, where further abuse can happen either at the hands of other abused children who are simply perpetuating a familiar patterns or the foster parents themselves. In 2004, 517,000 children were living in foster homes, and in 2005, a fifth of reported child abuse victims were taken out of their homes after child maltreatment investigations. ⁶ Sometimes, children do go back to their parents after being taken away, but these statistics are slim. It's easy to imagine that foster care and group home situations, while they may ease the incidence of abuse in a child's life, can lead to further types of alienation and trauma.

How does child abuse turn into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

For children that have suffered from abuse, it can be complex getting to the root of childhood trauma in order to alleviate later symptoms as adults. The question is, how does child abuse turn into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder later in life? What are the circumstances that cause this to happen in some cases and not others?

Statistics show that females are much more likely than males to develop PTSD as a result of experiencing child abuse. Other factors that help determine whether a child victim will develop PTSD: ⁷

The degree of perceived personal threat

The developmental state of the child: Some professionals surmise that younger children, because they are less likely to intellectually understand and interpret the effects of a traumatic situation, may be less at risk for long-term PTSD)

The relationship of the victim to the perpetrator

The level of support the victim has in his day-to-day life as well as the response of the caregiver(s)

Guilt: A feeling of responsibility for the attack ("I deserve it") is thought to exacerbate the changes of PTSD

Resilience: the innate ability to cope of the individual

The child's short-term response to abuse: For instance, an elevated heart rate post-abuse has been documented as increasing the likelihood that the victim will be later suffer from PTSD.

Carolyn Knight wrote a book called Working With Adult Survivors of Childhood Trauma that states: "Trauma, by definition, is the result of exposure to an inescapably stressful event that overwhelms a person's coping mechanisms." ⁶ She points out that an important aspect of an event (or pattern of events) is that it exceeds the victim's ability to cope and is therefore overwhelming. A child should not have to cope with abuse, and when abuse occurs, a child is not equipped psychologically to process it. The adults in their lives are meant to be role models on how to regulate emotions and provide a safe environment.

According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, some of the particular symptoms of child PTSD include:⁸

Frequent memories and/or talk of the traumatic event(s)

Repeated physical or emotional symptoms whenever the child is confronted with the event

Fear of dying

Loss of interest in activities

Regular physical complaints such as headaches or stomachaches

Extreme emotional reactions

Trouble sleeping

Irritability, anger, violence

Difficulty concentrating

Constant or often clingy or whiny behavior and regression to a younger age

Increased vigilance or alertness to their environment

Once a child has grown to be an adult, however, symptoms of PTSD can become more subtle as he or she learns how to cope with this in day-to-day life. The symptoms of PTSD can be quite general and can mimic other disorders: depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, problems with alcohol and drugs, sleep issues, and eating disorders are just a few. Many have problems in their relationships and trusting another person again. Many even end up in abusive relationships and find themselves re-enacting the past.

Community support is a vital tool in preventing child abuse and the PTSD that can result from it. If you suspect that you or a loved one is suffering from child abuse, please report it to your local Child Protection Services - or the police, if a child is in immediate danger. The longer that abuse continues, the higher the risk of causing severe symptoms.

For more information about actions to take if you suspect a case of child abuse, visit the Dreamcatchers website.

If you or a loved one may be suffering from delayed effects of trauma due to childhood abuse, I encourage you to make a therapy appointment with someone who specializes in trauma and who can put you on a path of healing.

Citations
1 Child Maltreatment 2006. Washington DC: US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children Youth and Families Children's Bureau; 2008. 1-194 2 http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/916007-overview 4 http://www.americanhumane.org/children/stop-child-abuse/fact-sheets/chil... 5 http://www.americanhumane.org/children/stop-child-abuse/fact-sheets/chil...
6 United States Department of Health and Human Services 7 "Child Abuse and Neglect, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder" by Angelo P Giardino, MD, PhD, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine; Medical Director, Texas Children's Health Plan, Inc

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According to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services statistics for 2006, approximately 905,000 U.S. children were found to have been maltreated that year, with 16% of them reported as physically abused (the remainder having suffered sexual abuse or neglect.)

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A hashtag celebrating black women!

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Don't bother trying to look up " Black Girl Magic" in the dictionary, because it isn't there -- at least not yet. But we're sure you've seen or heard the phrase plenty of times over the past year and are wondering what it means. Well, it was created by CaShawn Thompson to celebrate the beauty, power and resilience of black women. And boy are we glad that she did!

Since that moment the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic has taken over social media platforms, Essence just dedicated three fierce February covers to the phenomenon and everything about Teen Vogue's latest issue featuring Amandla Stenberg is most definitely filled with magic.

If we had to nail down a definition, we'd say:

Black Girl Magic is a term used to illustrate the universal awesomeness of black women. It's about celebrating anything we deem particularly dope, inspiring, or mind-blowing about ourselves.

And that's just the start. Like black women in general, our essence, style and spirit are hard to define. Some might call us mysterious, but we're most certainly magical.

Check out the video above and tell us what #BlackGirlMagic means to you in the comments section.
P.S. Don't forget share the video with all the magical black women you know!

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The Meaning Of #BlackGirlMagic, And How You Can Get Some Of It

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Don't bother trying to look up " Black Girl Magic" in the dictionary, because it isn't there -- at least not yet. But we're sure you've seen or heard the phrase plenty of times over the past year and are wondering what it means.

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Chance the Rapper shared a picture of himself with a popular hashtag

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People Are Sharing Their Black Boy Joy And It Is The Best Thing Ever

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Recalling his days in school, he used the time to further his education. It was during this period of self-enlightenment that Malcolm's brother Reginald would visit and discuss his recent conversion to the Muslim religion. Reginald belonged to the religious organization the Nation of Islam (NOI).

Intrigued, Malcolm began to study the teachings of NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad taught that white society actively worked to keep African-Americans from empowering themselves and achieving political, economic, and social success. Among other goals, the NOI fought for a state of their own, separate from one inhabited by white people. By the time he was paroled in 1952, Malcolm was a devoted follower with the new surname "X" (He considered "Little" a slave name and chose the "X" to signify his lost tribal name.).

Intelligent and articulate, Malcolm was appointed as a minister and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad also charged him with establishing new mosques in cities such as Detroit, Michigan, and Harlem. Malcolm utilized newspaper columns, as well as radio and television, to communicate the NOI's message across the United States. His charisma, drive, and conviction attracted an astounding number of new members. Malcolm was largely credited with increasing membership in the NOI from 500 in 1952 to 30,000 in 1963.

The crowds and controversy surrounding Malcolm made him a media magnet. He was featured in a weeklong television special with Mike Wallace in 1959, called The Hate That Hate Produced. The program explored the fundamentals of the NOI, and tracked Malcolm's emergence as one of its most important leaders. After the special, Malcolm was faced with the uncomfortable reality that his fame had eclipsed that of his mentor Elijah Muhammad. In addition to the media, Malcolm's vivid personality had captured the government's attention. As membership in the NOI continued to grow, FBI agents infiltrated the organization (one even acted as Malcolm's bodyguard) and secretly placed bugs, wiretaps, cameras, and other surveillance equipment to monitor the group's activities.
Malcolm's faith was dealt a crushing blow at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963. He learned that his mentor and leader, Elijah Muhammad, was secretly having relations with as many as six women within the Nation of Islam organization. As if that were not enough, Malcolm found out that some of these relationships had resulted in children.

Since joining the NOI, Malcolm had strictly adhered to the teachings of Muhammad, which included remaining celibate until his marriage to Betty Shabazz in 1958. Malcolm refused Muhammad's request to help cover up the affairs and subsequent children. He was deeply hurt by Muhammad's actions, because he had previously considered him a living prophet. Malcolm also felt guilty about the masses he had led to join the NOI, which he now felt was a fraudulent organization built on too many lies to ignore.

Shortly after his shocking discovery, Malcolm received criticism for a comment he made regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. "[Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon," said Malcolm. After the statement, Elijah Muhammad "silenced" Malcolm for 90 days. Malcolm, however, suspected he was silenced for another reason. In March 1964, Malcolm terminated his relationship with the NOI. Unable to look past Muhammad's deception, Malcolm decided to found his own religious organization, the Muslim Mosque, Inc.

That same year, Malcolm went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, which proved to be life altering for him. For the first time, Malcolm shared his thoughts and beliefs with different cultures and found the response to be overwhelmingly positive. When he returned, Malcolm said he had met "blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers." He returned to the United States with a new outlook on integration and a new hope for the future. This time when Malcolm spoke, instead of just preaching to African-Americans, he had a message for all races.

After Malcolm resigned his position in the Nation of Islam and renounced Elijah Muhammad, relations between the two had become increasingly volatile. FBI informants working undercover in the NOI warned officials that Malcolm had been marked for assassination-one undercover officer had even been ordered to help plant a bomb in Malcolm's car.

After repeated attempts on his life, Malcolm rarely traveled anywhere without bodyguards. On February 14, 1965 the home where Malcolm, Betty, and their four daughters lived in East Elmhurst, New York was firebombed. Luckily, the family escaped physical injury.

One week later, however, Malcolm's enemies were successful in their ruthless attempt. At a speaking engagement in the Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, three gunmen rushed Malcolm onstage. They shot him 15 times at close range. The 39-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Fifteen hundred people attended Malcolm's funeral in Harlem on February 27, 1965 at the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ (now Child's Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ). After the ceremony, friends took the shovels away from the waiting gravediggers and buried Malcolm themselves.

Later that year, Betty gave birth to their twin daughters.

Malcolm's assassins, Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson, were convicted of first-degree murder in March 1966. The three men were all members of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X's legacy has moved through generations as the subject of numerous documentaries, books, and movies. A tremendous resurgence of interest occurred in 1992 when director Spike Lee released the acclaimed movie, Malcolm X. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Denzel Washington) and Best Costume Design.

Malcolm X is buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

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Recalling his days in school, he used the time to further his education. It was during this period of self-enlightenment that Malcolm's brother Reginald would visit and discuss his recent conversion to the Muslim religion. Reginald belonged to the religious organization the Nation of Islam (NOI).

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Choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city 

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Choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city 

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In the spring of 2014, when our daughter, Najya, was turning 4, my husband and I found ourselves facing our toughest decision since becoming parents. We live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a low-income, heavily black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of brownstones in central Brooklyn. The nearby public schools are named after people intended to evoke black uplift, like Marcus Garvey, a prominent black nationalist in the 1920s, and Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month, but the schools are a disturbing reflection of New York City's stark racial and socioeconomic divisions. In one of the most diverse cities in the world, the children who attend these schools learn in classrooms where all of their classmates - and I mean, in most cases, every single one - are black and Latino, and nearly every student is poor. Not surprisingly, the test scores of most of Bed-Stuy's schools reflect the marginalization of their students.

I didn't know any of our middle-class neighbors, black or white, who sent their children to one of these schools. They had managed to secure seats in the more diverse and economically advantaged magnet schools or gifted-and-talented programs outside our area, or opted to pay hefty tuition to progressive but largely white private institutions. I knew this because from the moment we arrived in New York with our 1-year-old, we had many conversations about where we would, should and definitely should not send our daughter to school when the time came.

My husband, Faraji, and I wanted to send our daughter to public school. Faraji, the oldest child in a military family, went to public schools that served Army bases both in America and abroad. As a result, he had a highly unusual experience for a black American child: He never attended a segregated public school a day of his life. He can now walk into any room and instantly start a conversation with the people there, whether they are young mothers gathered at a housing-project tenants' meeting or executives eating from small plates at a ritzy cocktail reception.

I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, on the wrong side of the river that divided white from black, opportunity from struggle, and started my education in a low-income school that my mother says was distressingly chaotic. I don't recall it being bad, but I do remember just one white child in my first-grade class, though there may have been more. That summer, my mom and dad enrolled my older sister and me in the school district's voluntary desegregation program, which allowed some black kids to leave their neighborhood schools for whiter, more well off ones on the west side of town. This was 1982, nearly three decades after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional, and near the height of desegregation in this country. My parents chose one of the whitest, richest schools, thinking it would provide the best opportunities for us. Starting in second grade, I rode the bus an hour each morning across town to the "best" public school my town had to offer, Kingsley Elementary, where I was among the tiny number of working-class children and the even tinier number of black children. We did not walk to school or get dropped off by our parents on their way to work. We showed up in a yellow bus, visitors in someone else's neighborhood, and were whisked back across the bridge each day as soon as the bell rang.

I remember those years as emotionally and socially fraught, but also as academically stimulating and world-expanding. Aside from the rigorous classes and quality instruction I received, this was the first time I'd shared dinners in the homes of kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers and scientists. My mom was a probation officer, and my dad drove a bus, and most of my family members on both sides worked in factories or meatpacking plants or did other manual labor. I understood, even then, in a way both intuitive and defensive, that my school friends' parents weren't better than my neighborhood friends' parents, who worked hard every day at hourly jobs. But this exposure helped me imagine possibilities, a course for myself that I had not considered before.

It's hard to say where any one person would have ended up if a single circumstance were different; our life trajectories are shaped by so many external and internal factors. But I have no doubt my parents' decision to pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from there to here - staff writer for The New York Times Magazine - more likely.

Integration was transformative for my husband and me. Yet the idea of placing our daughter in one of the small number of integrated schools troubled me. These schools are disproportionately white and serve the middle and upper middle classes, with a smattering of poor black and Latino students to create "diversity."

In a city where white children are only 15 percent of the more than one million public-school students, half of them are clustered in just 11 percent of the schools, which not coincidentally include many of the city's top performers. Part of what makes those schools desirable to white parents, aside from the academics, is that they have some students of color, but not too many. This carefully curated integration, the kind that allows many white parents to boast that their children's public schools look like the United Nations, comes at a steep cost for the rest of the city's black and Latino children.

The New York City public-school system is 41 percent Latino, 27 percent black and 16 percent Asian. Three-quarters of all students are low-income. In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, released a report showing that New York City public schools are among the most segregated in the country. Black and Latino children here have become increasingly isolated, with 85 percent of black students and 75 percent of Latino students attending "intensely" segregated schools - schools that are less than 10 percent white.

This is not just New York's problem. I've spent much of my career as a reporter chronicling rampant school segregation in every region of the country, and the ways that segregated schools harm black and Latino children. One study published in 2009 in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management showed that the academic achievement gap for black children increased as they spent time in segregated schools. Schools with large numbers of black and Latino kids are less likely to have experienced teachers, advanced courses, instructional materials and adequate facilities, according to the United States Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. Most black and Latino students today are segregated by both race and class, a combination that wreaks havoc on the learning environment. Research stretching back 50 years shows that the socioeconomic makeup of a school can play a larger role in achievement than the poverty of an individual student's family. Getting Najya into one of the disproportionately white schools in the city felt like accepting the inevitability of this two-tiered system: one set of schools with excellent resources for white kids and some black and Latino middle-class kids, a second set of underresourced schools for the rest of the city's black and Latino kids.

When the New York City Public Schools catalog arrived in the mail one day that spring, with information about Mayor Bill de Blasio's new universal prekindergarten program, I told Faraji that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income school. Faraji's eyes widened as I explained that if we removed Najya, whose name we chose because it means "liberated" and "free" in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem. Saying my child deserved access to "good" public schools felt like implying that children in "bad" schools deserved the schools they got, too. I understood that so much of school segregation is structural - a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I'd seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.

One family, or even a few families, cannot transform a segregated school, but if none of us were willing to go into them, nothing would change. Putting our child into a segregated school would not integrate it racially, but we are middle-class and would, at least, help to integrate it economically. As a reporter, I'd witnessed how the presence of even a handful of middle-class families made it less likely that a school would be neglected. I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.

As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the "good" public schools, or even private schools. So we argued, pleading our cases from the living room, up the steps to our office lined with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down, before we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners. There is nothing harder than navigating our nation's racial legacy in this country, and the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same time. Faraji couldn't believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. "Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?" he asked. "Are we putting her at a disadvantage?"

At the heart of Faraji's concern was a fear that grips black families like ours. We each came from working-class roots, fought our way into the middle class and had no family wealth or safety net to fall back on. Faraji believed that our gains were too tenuous to risk putting our child in anything but a top-notch school. And he was right to be worried. In 2014, the Brookings Institution found that black children are particularly vulnerable to downward mobility - nearly seven of 10 black children born into middle-income families don't maintain that income level as adults. There was no margin for error, and we had to use our relative status to fight to give Najya every advantage. Hadn't we worked hard, he asked, frustration building in his voice, precisely so that she would not have to go to the types of schools that trapped so many black children?

Eventually I persuaded him to visit a few schools with me. Before work, we peered into the classrooms of three neighborhood schools, and a fourth, Public School 307, located in the Vinegar Hill section of Brooklyn, near the East River waterfront and a few miles from our home. P.S. 307's attendance zone was drawn snugly around five of the 10 buildings that make up the Farragut Houses, a public-housing project with 3,200 residents across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The school's population was 91 percent black and Latino. Nine of 10 students met federal poverty standards. But what went on inside the school was unlike what goes on in most schools serving the city's poorest children. This was in large part because of the efforts of a remarkable principal, Roberta Davenport. She grew up in Farragut, and her younger siblings attended P.S. 307. She became principal five decades later in 2003, to a low-performing school. Davenport commuted from Connecticut, but her car was usually the first one in the parking lot each morning, often because she worked so late into the night that, exhausted, she would sleep at a friend's nearby instead of making the long drive home. Soft of voice but steely in character, she rejected the spare educational orthodoxy often reserved for poor black and brown children that strips away everything that makes school joyous in order to focus solely on improving test scores. These children from the projects learned Mandarin, took violin lessons and played chess. Thanks to her hard work, the school had recently received money from a federal magnet grant, which funded a science, engineering and technology program aimed at drawing middle-class children from outside its attendance zone.

Faraji and I walked the bright halls of P.S. 307, taking in the reptiles in the science room and the students learning piano during music class. The walls were papered with the precocious musings of elementary children. While touring the schools, Faraji later told me, he started feeling guilty about his instinct to keep Najya out of them. Were these children, he asked himself, worthy of any less than his own child? "These are kids who look like you," he told me. "Kids like the ones you grew up with. I was being very selfish about it, thinking: I am going to get mine for my child, and that's it. And I am ashamed of that."

When it was time to submit our school choices to the city, we put down all four of the schools we visited. In May 2014, we learned Najya had gotten into our first choice, P.S. 307. We were excited but also nervous. I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel pulled in the way other parents with options feel pulled. I had moments when I couldn't ignore the nagging fear that in my quest for fairness, I was being unfair to my own daughter. I worried - I worry still - about whether I made the right decision for our little girl. But I knew I made the just one.

For many white Americans, millions of black and Latino children attending segregated schools may seem like a throwback to another era, a problem we solved long ago. And legally, we did. In 1954, the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, striking down laws that forced black and white children to attend separate schools. But while Brown v. Board targeted segregation by state law, we have proved largely unwilling to address segregation that is maintained by other means, resulting from the nation's long and racist history.

In the Supreme Court's decision, the justices responded unanimously to a group of five cases, including that of Linda Brown, a black 8-year-old who was not allowed to go to her white neighborhood school in Topeka, Kan., but was made to ride a bus to a black school much farther away. The court determined that separate schools, even if they had similar resources, were "inherently" - by their nature - unequal, causing profound damage to the children who attended them and hobbling their ability to live as full citizens of their country. The court's decision hinged on sociological research, including a key study by the psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark, a husband-and-wife team who gave black children in segregated schools in the North and the South black and white dolls and asked questions about how they perceived them. Most students described the white dolls as good and smart and the black dolls as bad and stupid. (The Clarks also found that segregation hurt white children's development.) Chief Justice Earl Warren felt so passionate about the issue that he read the court's opinion aloud: "Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does." The ruling made clear that because this nation was founded on a racial caste system, black children would never become equals as long as they were separated from white children.

In New York City, home to the largest black population in the country, the decision was celebrated by many liberals as the final strike against school segregation in the "backward" South. But Kenneth Clark, the first black person to earn a doctorate in psychology at Columbia University and to hold a permanent professorship at City College of New York, was quick to dismiss Northern righteousness on race matters. At a meeting of the Urban League around the time of the decision, he charged that though New York had no law requiring segregation, it intentionally separated its students by assigning them to schools based on their race or building schools deep in segregated neighborhoods. In many cases, Clark said, black children were attending schools that were worse than those attended by their black counterparts in the South.

Clark's words shamed proudly progressive white New Yorkers and embarrassed those overseeing the nation's largest school system. The New York City Board of Education released a forceful statement promising to integrate its schools: "Segregated, racially homogeneous schools damage the personality of minority-group children. These schools decrease their motivation and thus impair their ability to learn. White children are also damaged. Public education in a racially homogeneous setting is socially unrealistic and blocks the attainment of the goals of democratic education, whether this segregation occurs by law or by fact." The head of the Board of Education undertook an investigation in 1955 that confirmed the widespread separation of black and Puerto Rican children in dilapidated buildings with the least-experienced and least-qualified teachers. Their schools were so overcrowded that some black children went to school for only part of the day to give others a turn.

The Board of Education appointed a commission to develop a citywide integration plan. But when school officials took some token steps, they faced a wave of white opposition. "It was most intense in the white neighborhoods closest to African-American neighborhoods, because they were the ones most likely to be affected by desegregation plans," says Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University and the author of "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North." By the mid-'60s, there were few signs of integration in New York's schools. In fact, the number of segregated junior-high schools in the city had quadrupled by 1964. That February, civil rights leaders called for a major one-day boycott of the New York City schools. Some 460,000 black and Puerto Rican students stayed home to protest their segregation. It was the largest demonstration for civil rights in the nation's history. But the boycott upset many white liberals, who thought it was too aggressive, and as thousands of white families fled to the suburbs, the integration campaign collapsed.

Even as New York City was ending its only significant effort to desegregate, the Supreme Court was expanding the Brown ruling. Beginning in the mid-'60s, the court handed down a series of decisions that determined that not only did Brown v. Board allow the use of race to remedy the effects of long-segregated schools, it also required it. Assigning black students to white schools and vice versa was necessary to destroy a system built on racism - even if white families didn't like it. "All things being equal, with no history of discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes," the court wrote in its 1971 ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which upheld busing to desegregate schools in Charlotte, N.C. "But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation. The remedy for such segregation may be administratively awkward, inconvenient and even bizarre in some situations, and may impose burdens on some; but all awkwardness and inconvenience cannot be avoided."

In what would be an extremely rare and fleeting moment in American history, all three branches of the federal government aligned on the issue. Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, pushed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, which prohibited segregated lunch counters, buses and parks and allowed the Department of Justice for the first time to sue school districts to force integration. It also gave the government the power to withhold federal funds if the districts did not comply. By 1973, 91 percent of black children in the former Confederate and border states attended school with white children.

But while Northern congressmen embraced efforts to force integration in the South, some balked at efforts to desegregate their own schools. They tucked a passage into the 1964 Civil Rights Act aiming to limit school desegregation in the North by prohibiting school systems from assigning students to schools in order to integrate them unless ordered to do so by a court. Because Northern officials often practiced segregation without the cover of law, it was far less likely that judges would find them in violation of the Constitution.

Not long after, the nation began its retreat from integration. Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, with the help of a coalition of white voters who opposed integration in housing and schools. He appointed four conservative justices to the Supreme Court and set the stage for a profound legal shift. Since 1974, when the Milliken v. Bradley decision struck down a lower court's order for a metro-area-wide desegregation program between nearly all-black Detroit city schools and the white suburbs surrounding the city, a series of major Supreme Court rulings on school desegregation have limited the reach of Brown.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he promoted the notion that using race to integrate schools was just as bad as using race to segregate them. He urged the nation to focus on improving segregated schools by holding them to strict standards, a tacit return to the "separate but equal" doctrine that was roundly rejected in Brown. His administration emphasized that busing and other desegregation programs discriminated against white students. Reagan eliminated federal dollars earmarked to help desegregation and pushed to end hundreds of school-desegregation court orders.

Yet this was the very period when the benefits of integration were becoming most apparent. By 1988, a year after Faraji and I entered middle school, school integration in the United States had reached its peak and the achievement gap between black and white students was at its lowest point since the government began collecting data. The difference in black and white reading scores fell to half what it was in 1971, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. (As schools have since resegregated, the test-score gap has only grown.) The improvements for black children did not come at the cost of white children. As black test scores rose, so did white ones.

Decades of studies have affirmed integration's power. A 2010 study released by the Century Foundation found that when children in public housing in Montgomery County, Md., enrolled in middle-class schools, the differences between their scores and those of their wealthier classmates decreased by half in math and a third in reading, and they pulled significantly ahead of their counterparts in poor schools. In fact, integration changes the entire trajectory of black students' lives. A 2015 longitudinal study by the economist Rucker Johnson at the University of California, Berkeley, followed black adults who had attended desegregated schools and showed that these adults, when compared with their counterparts or even their own siblings in segregated schools, were less likely to be poor, suffer health problems and go to jail, and more likely to go to college and reside in integrated neighborhoods. They even lived longer. Critically, these benefits were passed on to their children, while the children of adults who went to segregated schools were more likely to perform poorly in school or drop out.

But integration as a constitutional mandate, as justice for black and Latino children, as a moral righting of past wrongs, is no longer our country's stated goal. The Supreme Court has effectively sided with Reagan, requiring strict legal colorblindness even if it leaves segregation intact, and even striking down desegregation programs that ensured integration for thousands of black students if a single white child did not get into her school of choice. The most recent example was a 2007 case that came to be known as Parents Involved. White parents in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, challenged voluntary integration programs, claiming the districts discriminated against white children by considering race as a factor in apportioning students among schools in order to keep them racially balanced. Five conservative justices struck down these integration plans. In 1968, the court ruled in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County that we should no longer look across a city and see a " 'white' school and a 'Negro' school, but just schools." In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote: "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again - even for very different reasons. ... The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Legally and culturally, we've come to accept segregation once again. Today, across the country, black children are more segregated than they have been at any point in nearly half a century. Except for a few remaining court-ordered desegregation programs, intentional integration almost never occurs unless it's in the interests of white students. This is even the case in New York City, under the stewardship of Mayor de Blasio, who campaigned by highlighting the city's racial and economic inequality. De Blasio and his schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, have acknowledged that they don't believe their job is to force school integration. "I want to see diversity in schools organically," Fariña said at a town-hall meeting in Lower Manhattan in February. "I don't want to see mandates." The shift in language that trades the word "integration" for "diversity" is critical. Here in this city, as in many, diversity functions as a boutique offering for the children of the privileged but does little to ensure quality education for poor black and Latino children.

"The moral vision behind Brown v. Board of Education is dead," Ritchie Torres, a city councilman who represents the Bronx and has been pushing the city to address school segregation, told me. Integration, he says, is seen as "something that would be nice to have but not something we need to create a more equitable society. At the same time, we have an intensely segregated school system that is denying a generation of kids of color a fighting chance at a decent life."

Najya, of course, had no idea about any of this. She just knew she loved P.S. 307, waking up each morning excited to head to her pre-K class, where her two best friends were a little black girl named Imani from Farragut and a little white boy named Sam, one of a handful of white pre-K students at the school, with whom we car-pooled from our neighborhood. Four excellent teachers, all of them of color, guided Najya and her classmates with a professionalism and affection that belied the school's dismal test scores. Faraji and I threw ourselves into the school, joining the parent-teacher association and the school's leadership team, attending assemblies and chaperoning field trips. We found ourselves relieved at how well things were going. Internally, I started to exhale.

But in the spring of 2015, as Najya's first year was nearing its end, we read in the news that another elementary school, P.S. 8, less than a mile from P.S. 307 in affluent Brooklyn Heights, was plagued by overcrowding. Some students zoned for that school might be rerouted to ours. This made geographic sense. P.S. 8's zone was expansive, stretching across Brooklyn Heights under the Manhattan bridge to the Dumbo neighborhood and Vinegar Hill, the neighborhood around P.S. 307. P.S. 8's lines were drawn when most of the development there consisted of factories and warehouses. But gentrification overtook Dumbo, which hugs the East River and provides breathtaking views of the skyline and a quick commute to Manhattan. The largely upper-middle-class and white and Asian children living directly across the street from P.S. 307 were zoned to the heavily white P.S. 8.

To accommodate the surging population, P.S. 8 had turned its drama and dance rooms into general classrooms and cut its pre-K, but it still had to place up to 28 kids in each class. Meanwhile, P.S. 307 sat at the center of the neighborhood population boom, half empty. Its attendance zone included only the Farragut Houses and was one of the tiniest in the city. Because Farragut residents were aging, with dwindling numbers of school-age children, P.S. 307 was underenrolled.

In early spring 2015, the city's Department of Education sent out notices telling 50 families that had applied to kindergarten at P.S. 8 that their children would be placed on the waiting list and instead guaranteed admission to P.S. 307. Distraught parents dashed off letters to school administrators and to their elected officials. They pleaded their case to the press. "We bought a home here, and one of the main reasons was because it was known that kindergarten admissions [at P.S. 8] were pretty much guaranteed," one parent told The New York Post, adding that he wouldn't send his child to P.S. 307. Another parent whose twins had secured coveted spots made the objections to P.S. 307 more plain: "I would be concerned about safety," he said. "I don't hear good things about that school."

That May, as I sat at a meeting that P.S. 8 parents arranged with school officials, I was struck by the sheer power these parents had drawn into that auditorium. This meeting about the overcrowding at P.S. 8, which involved 50 children in a system of more than one million, had summoned a state senator, a state assemblywoman, a City Council member, the city comptroller and the staff members of several other elected officials. It had rarely been clearer to me how segregation and integration, at their core, are about power and who gets access to it. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1967: "I cannot see how the Negro will totally be liberated from the crushing weight of poor education, squalid housing and economic strangulation until he is integrated, with power, into every level of American life."

As the politicians looked on, two white fathers gave an impassioned PowerPoint presentation in which they asked the Department of Education to place more children into already-teeming classrooms rather than send kids zoned to P.S. 8 to P.S. 307. Another speaker, whose child had been wait-listed, choked up as he talked about having to break it to his kindergarten-age son that he would not be able to go to school with the children with whom he'd shared play dates and Sunday dinners. "We haven't told him yet" that he didn't get into P.S. 8, the father said, as eyes in the crowd grew misty. "We hope to never have to tell him."

The meeting was emotional and at times angry, with parents shouting out their anxieties about safety and low test scores at P.S. 307. But the concerns they voiced may have also masked something else. While suburban parents, who are mostly white, say they are selecting schools based on test scores, the racial makeup of a school actually plays a larger role in their school decisions, according to a 2009 study published in The American Journal of Education. Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University's Teachers College, found the same thing when she studied how white parents choose schools in New York City. "In a post-racial era, we don't have to say it's about race or the color of the kids in the building," Wells told me. "We can concentrate poverty and kids of color and then fail to provide the resources to support and sustain those schools, and then we can see a school full of black kids and then say, 'Oh, look at their test scores.' It's all very tidy now, this whole system."

I left that meeting upset about how P.S. 307 had been characterized, but I didn't give it much thought again until the end of summer, when Najya was about to start kindergarten. I heard that the community education council was holding a meeting to discuss a potential rezoning of P.S. 8 and P.S. 307. The council, an elected group that oversees 28 public schools in District 13, including P.S. 8 and P.S. 307, is responsible for approving zoning decisions. School was still out for the summer, and almost no P.S. 307 parents knew plans were underway that could affect them. At the meeting, two men from the school system's Office of District Planning projected a rezoning map onto a screen. The plan would split the P.S. 8 zone roughly in half, divided by the Brooklyn Bridge. It would turn P.S. 8 into the exclusive neighborhood school for Brooklyn Heights and reroute Dumbo and Vinegar Hill students to P.S. 307. A tall, white man with brown hair that flopped over his forehead said he was from Concord Village, a complex that should have fallen on the 307 side of the line. He thanked the council for producing a plan that reflected his neighbors' concerns by keeping his complex in the P.S. 8 zone. It became clear that while parents in Farragut, Dumbo and Vinegar Hill had not even known about the rezoning plan, some residents had organized and lobbied to influence how the lines were drawn.

The officials presented the rezoning plan, which would affect incoming kindergartners, as beneficial to everyone. If the children in the part of the zone newly assigned to P.S. 307 enrolled at the school, P.S. 8's overcrowding would be relieved at least temporarily. And P.S. 307, the officials' presentation showed, would fill its empty seats with white children and give all the school's students that most elusive thing: integration.

It was hard not to be skeptical about the department's plan. New York, like many deeply segregated cities, has a terrible track record of maintaining racial balance in formerly underenrolled segregated schools once white families come in. Schools like P.S. 321 in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood and the Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene tend to go through a brief period of transitional integration, in which significant numbers of white students enroll, and then the numbers of Latino and black students dwindle. In fact, that's exactly what happened at P.S. 8.

A decade ago, P.S. 8 was P.S. 307's mirror image. Predominantly filled with low-income black and Latino students from surrounding neighborhoods, P.S. 8, with its low test scores and low enrollment, languished amid a community of affluence because white parents in the neighborhood refused to send their children there. A group of parents worked hard with school administrators to turn the school around, writing grants to start programs for art and other enrichment activities. Then more white and Asian parents started to enroll their children. One of them was David Goldsmith, who later became president of the community education council tasked with considering the rezoning of P.S. 8 and P.S. 307. Goldsmith is white and, at the time, lived in Vinegar Hill with his Filipino wife and their daughter.

As P.S. 8 improved, more and more white families from Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo and Vinegar Hill enrolled their children, and the classrooms in the lower grades became majority white. The whitening of the school had unintended consequences. Some of the black and Latino parents whose children had been in the school from the beginning felt as if they were being marginalized. The white parents were able to raise large sums at fund-raisers and could be dismissive of the much smaller fund-raising efforts that had come before. Then, Goldsmith says, the new parents started seeking to separate their children from their poorer classmates. "There were kids in the school that were really high-risk kids, kids who were homeless, living in temporary shelters, you know, poverty can be really brutal," Goldsmith says. "The school was really committed to helping all children, but we had white middle-class parents saying, 'I don't want my child in the same class with the kid who has emotional issues.' "

The parents who had helped build P.S. 8, black, Latino, white and Asian, feared they were losing something important, a truly diverse school that nurtured its neediest students, where families held equal value no matter the size of their paychecks. They asked for a plan to help the school maintain its black and Latino population by setting aside a percentage of seats for low-income children, but they didn't get approval.

P.S. 8's transformation to a school where only one in four students are black or Latino and only 14 percent are low-income began during the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, known for its indifference toward efforts to integrate schools. But integration advocates say that they've also been deeply disappointed by the de Blasio administration's stance on the issue. In October 2014, after the release of the U.C.L.A. study pointing to the extreme segregation in the city's schools, and nearly a year after de Blasio was elected, Councilmen Ritchie Torres and Brad Lander moved to force the administration to address segregation, introducing what became the School Diversity Accountability Act, which would require the Department of Education to release school-segregation figures and report what it was doing to alleviate the problem. "It was always right in front of our faces," says Lander, a representative from Brooklyn, whose own children attend heavily white public schools. "Then the U.C.L.A. report hit, and the segregation in the city became urgent."

The same month that Lander and Torres introduced the bill, Fariña, the schools chancellor, took questions at a town-hall-style meeting for area schools held at P.S. 307. A group of four women, two white, two black, walked to the microphone to address Fariña. They said that they were parents in heavily gentrified Park Slope, and that Fariña's administration had been ignoring their calls to help their school retain its diminishing black and Latino populations by implementing a policy to set aside seats for low-income children. Fariña, a diminutive woman with a no-nonsense attitude, responded by acknowledging that there "are no easy answers" to the problem of segregation, and warned that there were "federal guidelines" limiting "what we can do around diversity." What Fariña was referring to is unclear. While the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in Parents Involved tossed out integration plans that took into account the race of individual students, the court has never taken issue with using students' socioeconomic status for creating or preserving integration, which is what these parents were seeking. In addition, the Obama administration released guidelines in 2011 that explicitly outlined the ways school systems could legally use race to integrate schools. Those include drawing a school's attendance zone around black and white neighborhoods.

At another town-hall meeting in Manhattan last October, Fariña said, "You don't need to have diversity within one building." Instead, she suggested that poor students in segregated schools could be pen pals and share resources with students in wealthier, integrated public schools. "We adopt schools from China, Korea or wherever," Fariña told the room of parents. "Why not in our own neighborhoods?" Integration advocates lambasted her for what they considered a callous portrayal of integration as nothing more than a cultural exchange. "Fariña's silly pen-pal comment shows how desensitized we've become," Torres told me. "It could be that the political establishment is willfully blind to the impact of racial segregation and has led themselves to believe that we can close the achievement gap without desegregating our school system. At worst it's a lie; at best it's a delusion." He continued, "The scandal is not that we are failing to achieve diversity. The scandal is we are not even trying."

Fariña would only talk to me for 15 minutes by phone. She told me in May that her pen-pal comments had been taken out of context. "If you hear any of my public speeches, this has always been a priority of mine," she said. "Diversity of all types has always been a priority." She went on to talk about the city's special programs for autistic students and about how Japanese students have benefited from the expansion of dual-language programs. But Asian-American students are already the group most integrated with white students. When pressed about integration specifically for black and Latino students, Fariña said the city has been working to support schools that are seeking more diversity and mentioned a socioeconomic integration pilot program at seven schools. "I do believe New York City is making strides. It is a major focus going forward."

On May 30, four days after our interview, the Department of Education said in an article in The Daily News that it was starting a voluntary systemwide "Diversity in Admissions" program and would be requesting proposals from principals. In 2014, several principals said they had submitted integration proposals and had not gotten any response from Fariña.

The announcement of the new initiative caught both principals and parents by surprise. Jill Bloomberg, principal at Brooklyn's Park Slope Collegiate, which teaches sixth through 12th grade, says she learned about the initiative from the news article but otherwise had heard nothing about it, even though the deadline to submit proposals is July 8, about a month away. "I am eager for some official notification for exactly what the program is," she told me.

David Goldsmith, who has been working on desegregation efforts as a member of the community education council, says he found the initiative, its timing and the short deadline for submitting proposals "puzzling." "We could be very cynical and say, 'They are not serious,' " he says.

Last June, de Blasio signed the School Diversity Accountability Act into law. But the law mandates only that the Department of Education report segregation numbers, not that it do anything to integrate schools. De Blasio declined to be interviewed, but when asked at a news conference in November why the city did not at least do what it could to redraw attendance lines, he defended the property rights of affluent parents who buy into neighborhoods to secure entry into heavily white schools. "You have to also respect families who have made a decision to live in a certain area," he said, because families have "made massive life decisions and investments because of which school their kid would go to." The mayor suggested there was little he could do because school segregation simply was a reflection of New York's stark housing segregation, entrenched by decades of discriminatory local and federal policy. "This is the history of America," he said.

Of course, de Blasio is right: Housing segregation and school segregation have always been entwined in America. But the opportunity to buy into "good" neighborhoods with "good" schools that de Blasio wants to protect has never been equally available to all.

To best understand how so many poor black and Latino children end up in neglected schools, and why so many white families have the money to buy into neighborhoods with the best schools, you need to look no further than the history of the Farragut Houses and P.S. 307. Looking at P.S. 307 today, you might find it hard to imagine that the school did not start out segregated. The low-slung brick elementary school, which opened in 1964, and the Farragut public-housing projects right outside its front doors once stood as hopeful, integrated islands in a city fractured by strict color lines in both its neighborhoods and its schools.

The 10 Farragut buildings, spread across roughly 18 acres, opened in 1952 as part of a scramble to house returning G.I.s and their families after World War II. When the first tenants moved in, the sprawling campus - named for David Farragut, an admiral of the United States Navy - was considered a model of progressive working-class housing, with its open green spaces, elevators, modern heating plant, laundry and community center.

In 1952, a black woman named Gladys McBeth became one of Farragut's earliest tenants. Nearly three generations later, when I visited her in November, she was living in the same 14th-floor apartment, where she paid about $1,000 a month in rent. Back then, she said, Farragut was a place for strivers. "I didn't know nothing about projects when I moved in," she said. "It was veteran housing." The project housed roughly even numbers of black and white tenants, including migrants escaping hardship from Poland, Puerto Rico and Italy, and from the feudal American South. To get in, everyone had to show proof of marriage, a husband's military-discharge papers and pay stubs.

Robert McBeth, Gladys's husband, drove a truck, while she stayed home raising their four children. In the years before the Brown decision, the oldest of the McBeth children went to a nearby school where the kids were predominantly black and Latino, because the New York City Board of Education bused white children in the area to other schools, according to the N.A.A.C.P. School officials at the time, as today, claimed the racial makeup of the schools was an inevitable result of residential segregation. Though Farragut was not yet segregated, most of the city was. And that segregation in housing often resulted from legal and open discrimination that was encouraged and condoned by the state, and at times required by the federal government.

Nowhere would that become more evident than in Farragut, which by the 1960s was careering toward the same fate overtaking nearly all public housing in big cities. White residents used Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to buy their way out of the projects and to move to shiny new middle-class subdivisions. This subsidized home-buying boom led to one of the broadest expansions of the American middle class ever, almost exclusively to the benefit of white families. The F.H.A.'s explicitly racist underwriting standards, which rated black and integrated neighborhoods as uninsurable, made federally insured home loans largely unavailable to black home seekers. Ninety-eight percent of these loans made between 1934 and 1968 went to white Americans.

Housing discrimination was legal until 1968. Even if black Americans managed to secure home loans, many homes were off-limits, either because they had provisions in their deeds prohibiting their sale to black buyers or because entire communities - including publicly subsidized middle-class developments like Levittown on Long Island and Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan - barred black home buyers and tenants outright. The McBeths tried to buy a house, but like so many of Farragut's black tenants, they were not able to. They continued to rent while many of their white neighbors bought homes and built wealth. Scholars attribute a large part of the yawning wealth gap between black and white Americans - the typical white person has 13 times the wealth of a typical black person - to discriminatory housing policies.

But before Farragut's white tenants left, parents of all colors sent their children to P.S. 307. Gladys McBeth, who died in May, sent her youngest child across the street to P.S. 307 and worked there as a school aide for 23 years. "It was one of the best schools in the district," she reminisced, sitting in a worn paisley chair. But by 1972, Farragut was more than 80 percent black, and to fill the vacant units and house the city's growing indigent population, the city changed the guideline for income and work requirements, turning the projects from largely working-class to low-income.

At some point, P.S. 307's attendance zone was redrawn to include only the Farragut Houses, ensuring the students would be black, Latino and poor. The New York City Department of Education does not keep attendance data before 2000, but as McBeth remembered it, by the late '80s, P.S. 307 was also almost entirely black and Latino. McBeth, who sent all four of her children to college, shook her head. "It all changed."

P.S. 307 was a very different place from what it had been, but Najya was thriving. I watched as she and her classmates went from struggling to sound out three-letter words to reading entire books. She would surprise me in the car rides after school with her discussions of hypotheses and photosynthesis, words we hadn't taught her. And there was something almost breathtaking about witnessing an auditorium full of mostly low-income black and Latino children confidently singing in Mandarin and beating Chinese drums as they performed a fan dance to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

But I also knew how fragile success at a school like P.S. 307 could be. The few segregated, high-poverty schools we hold up as exceptions are almost always headed by a singular principal like Roberta Davenport. But relying on one dynamic leader is a precarious means of ensuring a quality education. With all the resources Davenport was able to draw to the school, P.S. 307's test scores still dropped this year. The school suffers from the same chronic absenteeism that plagues other schools with large numbers of low-income families. And then Davenport retired last summer, just as the clashes over P.S. 307's integration were heating up, causing alarm among parents.

Najya and the other children at P.S. 307 were unaware of the turmoil and the battle lines adults were drawing outside the school's doors. Faraji, my husband, had been elected co-president of P.S. 307's P.T.A. along with Benjamin Greene, another black middle-class parent from Bed-Stuy, who also serves on the community education council. As the potential for rezoning loomed over the school, they were forced to turn their attention from fund-raising and planning events to working to prevent the city's plan from ultimately creating another mostly white school.

It was important to them that Farragut residents, who were largely unaware of the process, had a say over what happened. Faraji and I had found it hard to bridge the class divides between the Farragut families and the middle-class black families, like ours, from outside the neighborhood. We parents were all cordial toward one another. Outside the school, though, we mostly went our separate ways. But after the rezoning was proposed, Faraji and Benjamin worked with the Rev. Dr. Mark V. C. Taylor of the Church of the Open Door, which sits on the Farragut property, and canvassed the projects to talk to parents and inform them of the city's proposal. Not one P.S. 307 parent they spoke to knew anything about the plan, and they were immediately worried and fearful about what it would mean for their children. P.S. 307 was that rare example of a well-resourced segregated school, and these parents knew it.

The Farragut parents were also angry and hurt over how their school and their children had been talked about in public meetings and the press. Some white Dumbo parents had told Davenport that they'd be willing to enroll their children only if she agreed to put the new students all together in their own classroom. Farragut parents feared their children would be marginalized. If the school eventually filled up with children from high-income white families - the median income for Dumbo and Vinegar Hill residents is almost 10 times that of Farragut residents - the character of the school could change, and as had happened at other schools like P.S. 8, the results might not benefit the black and Latino students. Among other things, P.S. 307 might no longer qualify for federal funds for special programming, like free after-school care, to help low-income families.

"I don't have a problem with people coming in," Saaiba Coles, a Farragut mother with two children at P.S. 307, told those gathered at a community meeting about the rezoning. "I just don't want them to forget about the kids that were already here." Faraji and Benjamin collected and delivered to the education council a petition with more than 400 signatures of Farragut residents supporting the rezoning, but only under certain conditions, including that half of all the seats at P.S. 307 would be guaranteed for low-income children. That would ensure that the school remained truly integrated and that new higher-income parents would have to share power in deciding the direction of the school.

In January of this year, the education council held a meeting to vote on the rezoning. Nearly four dozen Farragut residents who'd taken two buses chartered by the church filed into the auditorium of a Brooklyn elementary school, sitting behind a cluster of anxious parents from Dumbo. Reporters lined up alongside them. In the months since the potential rezoning plan was announced, the spectacle of an integration fight in the progressive bastion of Brooklyn had attracted media attention. Coverage appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and on WNYC. "Brooklyn hipsters fight school desegregation," the news site Raw Story proclaimed. The meeting lasted more than three hours as parents spoke passionately, imploring the council to delay the vote so that the two communities could try to get to know each other and figure out how they could bridge their economic, racial and cultural divides. Both Dumbo and Farragut parents asked the district for leadership, fearing integration that was not intentionally planned would fail.

In the end, the council proceeded with the vote, approving the rezoning with a 50 percent low-income set-aside, but children living in P.S. 307's attendance zone would receive priority. But that's not a guarantee. White children under the age of 5 outnumber black and Latino children of the same age in the new zone, according to census data. And the white population will only grow as new developments go on the market. Without holding seats for low-income children, it's not certain the school will achieve 50 percent low-income enrollment.

David Goldsmith, president of the council, told me he didn't believe that creating low-income set-asides in only one school made sense; he is working to create a plan that would try to integrate the schools in the entire district that includes P.S. 8 and P.S. 307. But Benjamin Greene, who voted against the rezoning because it did not guarantee that half of the seats would remain for low-income children, said: "We cannot sit around and wait until somebody decides on this wonderful formula districtwide. We have to preserve these schools one at a time."

In voting for the rezoning, the council touted its bravery and boldness in choosing integration in a system that seemed opposed to it. "With the eyes of the nation upon us," Goldsmith began. "Voting 'yes' means we refuse to be victims of the past. We are ready to do this. The time is now. We owe this to our children."

But the decision felt more like a victory for the status quo. This rezoning did not occur because it was in the best interests of P.S. 307's black and Latino children, but because it served the interests of the wealthy, white parents of Brooklyn Heights. P.S. 8 will only get whiter and more exclusive: The council failed to mention at the meeting that the plan would send future students from the only three Farragut buildings that had been zoned for P.S. 8 to P.S. 307, ultimately removing almost all the low-income students from P.S. 8 and turning it into one of the most affluent schools in the city. The Department of Education projects that within six years, P.S. 8 could be three-quarters white in a school system where only one-seventh of the kids are white.

P.S. 307 may eventually look similar. Without seats guaranteed for low-income children, and with an increasing white population in the zone, the school may flip and become mostly white and overcrowded. Farragut parents worry that at that point, the project's children, like those at P.S. 8, could be zoned out of their own school. A decade from now, integration advocates could be lamenting how P.S. 307 went from nearly all black and Latino to being integrated for a period to heavily white.

That transition isn't going to happen immediately, so some Dumbo parents have threatened to move, or enroll their children in private schools. Others are struggling over what to do. By allowing such vast disparities between public schools - racially, socioeconomically and academically - this city has made integration the hardest choice.

"You're not living in Brooklyn if you don't want to have a diverse system around your kid," Michael Jones, who lives in Brooklyn Heights and considered sending his twins to P.S. 307 for pre-K because P.S. 8 no longer offered it, told me over coffee. "You want it to be multicultural. You know, if you didn't want that, you'd be in private school, or you would be in a different area. So, we're all living in Brooklyn because we want that to be part of the upbringing. But you can understand how a parent might look at it and go, 'While I want diversity, I don't want profound imbalance.' " He thought about what it would have meant for his boys to be among the few middle-class children in P.S. 307. "We could look at it and see there is probably going to be a clash of some kind," he said. "My kid's not an experiment." In the end, he felt that he could not take a chance on his children's education and sent them to private preschool; they now go to P.S. 8.

This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural. Najya's first two years in public school helped me understand this better than I ever had before. Even Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose research showed the debilitating effects of segregation on black children, chose not to enroll his children in the segregated schools he was fighting against. "My children," he said, "only have one life." But so do the children relegated to this city's segregated schools. They have only one life, too.

Correction: June 26, 2016

Correction: July 3, 2016

Opinion Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Separated at Birth

Opinion Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Separated at Birth

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Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City

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In the spring of 2014, when our daughter, Najya, was turning 4, my husband and I found ourselves facing our toughest decision since becoming parents. We live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a low-income, heavily black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of brownstones in central Brooklyn.

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From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated. Here is a sampling of laws from various states.

Amateur Baseball

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.

Barbers

Georgia - No colored barber shall serve as a barber [to] white women or girls.

Bathroom Facilities, Male

Alabama - Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.

The Blind

Louisiana - The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race.

Burial

Georgia - The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons.

Buses

Alabama - All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races.

Child Custody

South Carolina - It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro.

Circus Tickets

Louisiana - All circuses, shows, and tent exhibitions, to which the attendance of...more than one race is invited or expected to attend shall provide for the convenience of its patrons not less than two ticket offices with individual ticket sellers, and not less than two entrances to the said performance, with individual ticket takers and receivers, and in the case of outside or tent performances, the said ticket offices shall not be less than twenty-five (25) feet apart.

Cohabitation

Florida - Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not married to each other, who shall habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve (12) months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred ($500.00) dollars.

Education

Florida - The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately.

Mississippi - Separate schools shall be maintained for the children of the white and colored races.

Missouri - Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.

New Mexico - Separate rooms [shall] be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and [when] said rooms are so provided, such pupils may not be admitted to the school rooms occupied and used by pupils of Caucasian or other descent.

Texas - [The County Board of Education] shall provide schools of two kinds; those for white children and those for colored children.

Fishing, Boating, and Bathing

Oklahoma - The [Conservation] Commission shall have the right to make segregation of the white and colored races as to the exercise of rights of fishing, boating and bathing.

Hospital Entrances

Mississippi - There shall be maintained by the governing authorities of every hospital maintained by the state for treatment of white and colored patients separate entrances for white and colored patients and visitors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are prepared.

Housing

Louisiana - Any person...who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family, or vice versa when the building is in occupancy by a negro person or negro family, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not less than twenty-five ($25.00) nor more than one hundred ($100.00) dollars or be imprisoned not less than 10, or more than 60 days, or both such fine and imprisonment in the discretion of the court.

Intermarriage

Arizona - The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void.

Florida - All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in violation of this section shall be void.

Maryland - All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race; or between the negro a nd a member of the Malay race; or between a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race, are forever prohibited, and shall be void.

Mississippi - The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto or person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.

Missouri - All marriages between...white persons and negroes or white persons and Mongolians...are prohibited and declared absolutely void...No person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood shall be permitted to marry any white person, nor shall any white person be permitted to marry any negro or person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood.

Wyoming - All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya hereafter contracted in the State of Wyoming are and shall be illegal and void.

Juvenile Delinquents

Florida - There shall be separate buildings, not nearer than one fourth mile to each other, one for white boys and one for negro boys. White boys and negro boys shall not, in any manner, be associated together or worked together.

Libraries

North Carolina - The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals.

Texas - Any white person of such county may use the county free library under the rules and regulations prescribed by the commissioners court and may be entitled to all the privileges thereof. Said court shall make proper provision for the negroes of said county to be served through a separate branch or branches of the county free library, which shall be administered by [a] custodian of the negro race under the supervision of the county librarian.

Lunch Counters

South Carolina - No persons, firms, or corporations, who or which furnish meals to passengers at station restaurants or station eating houses, in times limited by common carriers of said passengers, shall furnish said meals to white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter.

Mental Hospitals

Georgia - The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together.

Militia

North Carolina - The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization.No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available, and while white permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers.

Mining

Oklahoma - The baths and lockers for the negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building.

Nurses

Alabama - No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.

Parks

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for colored people to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the benefit, use and enjoyment of white persons...and unlawful for any white person to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the use and benefit of colored persons.

Pool and Billiard Rooms

Alabama - It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.

Prisons

Mississippi - The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts.

Promotion of Equality

Mississippi - Any person...who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine or not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both.

Railroads

Alabama - The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.

Maryland - All railroad companies and corporations, and all persons running or operating cars or coaches by steam on any railroad line or track in the State of Maryland, for the transportation of passengers, are hereby required to provide separate cars or coaches for the travel and transportation of the white and colored passengers.

Virginia - The conductors or managers on all such railroads shall have power, and are hereby required, to assign to each white or colored passenger his or her respective car, coach or compartment. If the passenger fails to disclose his race, the conductor and managers, acting in good faith, shall be the sole judges of his race.

Reform Schools

Kentucky - The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other.

Restaurants

Alabama - It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.

Georgia - All persons licensed to conduct a restaurant, shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room or serve the two races anywhere under the same license.

Teaching

Oklahoma - Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined in any sum not less than ten dollars ($10.00) nor more than fifty dollars ($50.00) for each offense.

Telephone Booths

Oklahoma - The Corporation Commission is hereby vested with power and authority to require telephone companies...to maintain separate booths for white and colored patrons when there is a demand for such separate booths. That the Corporation Commission shall determine the necessity for said separate booths only upon complaint of the people in the town and vicinity to be served after due hearing as now provided by law in other complaints filed with the Corporation Commission.

Textbooks

North Carolina - Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.

Theaters

Virginia - Every person...operating...any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or any place of public entertainment or public assemblage which is attended by both white and colored persons, shall separate the white race and the colored race and shall set apart and designate...certain seats therein to be occupied by white persons and a portion thereof , or certain seats therein, to be occupied by colored persons.

Transportation

North Carolina - The...Utilities Commission...is empowered and directed to require the establishment of separate waiting rooms at all stations for the white and colored races.

Wine and Beer

Georgia - All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time.

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Jim Crow Laws - Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race.

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Rep. John Lewis discusses fight for voting rights in the 1960s

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Rep. John Lewis discusses fight for voting rights in the 1960s

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Rep. Lewis from Atlanta worked with MLK Jr. to pass voting rights i

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subscribe to NPR Politics Podcast podcast

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Another National Book Award winner this week is John Lewis, the longtime civil rights leader and Georgia congressman. His book called "March: Book 3," co-written with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell, won in the category of young people's literature. It's a graphic novel dramatizing the now-famous voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery for which Lewis was one of the leaders. Terry spoke with John Lewis in 2009 the day before the first inauguration of President Barack Obama. John Lewis told Terry that he grew up in Alabama at a time when there was one county whose population was 80 percent African-American. But there wasn't a single black voter.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

Congressman Lewis, welcome to FRESH AIR. And thank you so much for joining us. When you were a young man, were you ever challenged at the polls? Did you have a hard time registering, or did anyone ever try to prevent you from voting?

JOHN LEWIS: When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.

GROSS: Why was it impossible?

LEWIS: Black men and women were not allowed to register to vote. My own mother, my own father, my grandfather and my uncles and aunts could not register to vote because each time they attempted to register to vote, they were told they could not pass the literacy test. And many people were so intimidated, so afraid that they would lose their jobs - they would be evicted from the farms - they almost gave up.

GROSS: Your parents were sharecroppers. Now...

LEWIS: My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers. They had been tenant farmers like so many people in the South. They knew the stories that had occurred. They knew places in Alabama where people were evicted from their farm, from their plantation.

GROSS: Now, because of that, did your parents tell you not to bother to try to vote because it would be dangerous? They might lose their farm? I mean, you were educated. You could certainly pass the literacy test.

LEWIS: My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination - they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble. But we had people that were educated. We had teachers. We had high school principals, people teaching in colleges and university in Tuskegee, Ala. But they were told they failed the so-called literacy test.

GROSS: One of the more dramatic moments of the civil-rights movement was a march that you helped lead in 1965 of about 600 people. The march was supposed to be from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., demanding voting rights. But the marchers were stopped soon after you started marching. And you were beaten by the police. Would you talk first a little bit about the goal of that march?

LEWIS: In 1965, the attempted march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7 was planned to dramatize to the state of Alabama and to the nation that people of color wanted to register to vote. In Selma, you could only attempt to register to vote on the first and third Mondays of each month. You had to go down to the courthouse and get a copy of the so-called literacy test and attempt to pass the test. And people stood in line day in and day out, failing to get a copy of the test or failing to pass the test.

So after several hundred people had been arrested and people had been beaten and one young man had been shot and killed, we decided to march. And on Sunday afternoon, about 600 of us left a little church called Brown Chapel AME Church and started walking in an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent fashion through the streets of Selma. We were walking in twos, no one saying a word. We came to the edge of the bridge crossing the Alabama River.

We continued to walk. We came to the highest point on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Down below, we saw a sea of blue - Alabama state troopers. And a man identified himself and said, I'm Maj. John Cloud of the Alabama state troopers. This is an unlawful march. I give you three minutes to disperse and return to your church.

In less than a minute and a half, the major said, troopers advance. And you saw these men putting on their gas masks. They came toward us, beating us with bullwhips, nightsticks, trivving (ph) us with horses and releasing the tear gas. I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. I thought I was going to die. I had a concussion there at the bridge. And almost 44 years later, I don't recall how I made it back across that bridge through the streets of Selma.

But I do recall being back at the church that Sunday afternoon. The church was full to capacity, more than 2,000 people on the outside. And someone said to me, John, say something to the audience. Speak to them. And I stood up and said something like, I don't understand it - how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam but cannot send troops to Selma, Ala., to protect people who only desire is to register to vote.

GROSS: What was the impact, do you think, of that march on the actual passage of the Voting Rights Act?

LEWIS: The march created a sense of righteous indignation among the American people. When they saw the photographs, when they read the stories, when they heard the news on the radio, watched it on television, they didn't like it. A few days after Bloody Sunday, there was demonstration in more than 80 American cities. People were demanding that the government act.

President Johnson didn't like what he saw. He called Governor Wallace, the governor of Alabama at the time, to come to Washington and tried to get assurance from the governor that he would be able to protect us if we decided to march again. The governor could not assure the president. So President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard, called up part of the United States military. And eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of the Congress and made one of the most meaningful speeches any American president had made in modern time on the whole question of voting rights and introduced the Voting Rights Act.

And at one point in the speech, before Dr. - before President Johnson, rather, concluded the speech, he said, and we shall overcome. And we shall overcome. I looked at Dr. King. Tears came down his face. And we all cried a little to hear President Johnson say, and we shall overcome. And he said to me and to others in the room, we will make it from Selma to Montgomery, and the Voting Rights Act will be passed.

Finally, two weeks after Bloody Sunday, we started on the third effort to make it from Selma to Montgomery. Three hundred of us marched all of the way. But by the time we walked into Montgomery, there were more than 25,000. And that effort led the Congress to debate the Voting Rights Acts and pass that act. And President Johnson signed it into law in August of 1965.

GROSS: Can you talk a little bit about how your mindset changed to go from what your parents told you, which was don't make trouble - it's too risky - to making a lot of trouble, to leading marches, to be willing to get beaten on the head and knocked unconscious to stand up for what you thought was right?

LEWIS: When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men, white women, colored women, white waiting. And I didn't like it. I would ask my mother and ask my parents over and over again, why? They said, that's the way it is. Don't get in the way. Don't get in trouble. I was so inspired by Rosa Parks in 1955. I was 15 years old. I was inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. I heard his words on all radio. It seemed like he was saying to me, John Lewis, you, too, can make a contribution.

He was speaking at a church in Montgomery. And he was saying, in effect, that we must not just be concerned about the pearly gates and the streets with milk and honey. We have to be concerned about the streets of Montgomery and the doors of Woolworth - that we have to be concerned about jobs, about blacks working as cashiers and bringing down those signs.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library, trying to check out some books. And we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library. I never went back to that public library until July 5, 1998 - by this time I'm in the Congress - for a book signing of my book, "Walking With The Wind."

GROSS: (Laughter) Your memoir.

LEWIS: And they gave me a library card after the program was over. And I was inspired. I studied the philosophy and the discipline of non-violence in Nashville as a student. And I staged a sitting-in in the fall of 1959 and got arrested the first time in February 1960.

GROSS: Congressman John Lewis, thank you so much for talking with us.

LEWIS: Well, thank you very much. Thank you.

BIANCULLI: Georgia Congressman John Lewis speaking to Terry Gross in 2009. His graphic novel about his civil-rights activities "March: Book 3" just won the National Book Award for young people's literature. Here's what he said at the awards ceremony.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LEWIS: Thank you. This is unreal. This is unbelievable. Some of you know I grew up in rural Alabama very, very poor - very few books in our home. And I remember in 1956, when I was 16 years old, with some of my brothers and sisters and cousins, going down to the public library, trying to get a library card. And we were told that the library was for whites only and not for colors. And to come here, receive this award, this honor - it's too much.

(APPLAUSE)

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Rep. John Lewis Looks Back On The Struggle For Voting Rights

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subscribe to NPR Politics Podcast podcast DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. Another National Book Award winner this week is John Lewis, the longtime civil rights leader and Georgia congressman. His book called "March: Book 3," co-written with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell, won in the category of young people's literature.

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Of their sojourn here

On our planet floor,

Any broad alarm of their hastening doom

Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,

Come, you may stand upon my

Back and face your distant destiny,

But seek no haven in my shadow,

I will give you no hiding place down here.

Long before that day, as she recounted in "Caged Bird" and its sequels, she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor (she was for many years the Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem); ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows from "Oprah" to " Sesame Street "; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.

In February 2011, Mr. Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor.

Throughout her writing, Ms. Angelou explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. As a whole, her work offered a cleareyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.

"If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat," Ms. Angelou wrote in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

Hallmarks of Ms. Angelou's prose style included a directness of voice that recalls African-American oral tradition and gives her work the quality of testimony. She was also intimately concerned with sensation, describing the world around her - be it Arkansas, San Francisco or the foreign cities in which she lived - with palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells.

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," published when Ms. Angelou was in her early 40s, spans only her first 17 years. But what powerfully formative years they were.

Marguerite Johnson was born in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. (For years after Dr. King's assassination, on April 4, 1968, Ms. Angelou did not celebrate her birthday.) Her dashing, defeated father, Bailey Johnson Sr., a Navy dietitian, "was a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women's skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his 'personal niche,' lost before birth and unrecovered since," Ms. Angelou wrote. "How maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur."

Her beautiful, volatile mother, Vivian Baxter, was variously a nurse, hotel owner and card dealer. (Ms. Angelou's 2013 account of life with her mother, "Mom & Me & Mom," became a best seller.) As a girl, Ms. Angelou was known as Rita, Ritie or Maya, her older brother's childhood nickname for her.

After her parents' marriage ended, 3-year-old Maya was sent with her 4-year-old brother, Bailey, to live with their father's mother in the tiny town of Stamps, Ark., which, she later wrote, "with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get."

Their grandmother, Annie Henderson, owned a general store "in the heart of the Negro area," Ms. Angelou wrote. An upright woman known as Momma, "with her solid air packed around her like cotton," she is a warm, stabilizing presence throughout "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

The children returned periodically to St. Louis to live with their mother. On one such occasion, when Maya was 7 or 8 (her age varies slightly across her memoirs, which employ techniques of fiction to recount actual events), she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. She told her brother, who alerted the family, and the man was tried and convicted. Before he could begin serving his sentence, he was murdered - probably, Ms. Angelou wrote, by her uncles.

Believing that her words had brought about the death, Maya did not speak for the next five years. Her love of literature, as she later wrote, helped restore language to her.

As a teenager, living with her mother in San Francisco, she studied dance and drama at the California Labor School and became the first black woman to work as a streetcar conductor there. At 16, after a casual liaison with a neighborhood youth, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. There the first book ends.

Reviewing "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" in The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it "a carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir."

The book - its title is a line from "Sympathy," by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar - became a best seller, confounding the stereotype, pervasive in the publishing world, that black women's lives were rarely worthy of autobiography.

The five volumes of Ms. Angelou's memoir that follow "Caged Bird" - all, like the first, originally published by Random House - were "Gather Together in My Name" (1974), "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas" (1976), "The Heart of a Woman" (1981), "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes" (1986) and "A Song Flung Up to Heaven" (2002).

They describe her struggles to support her son, Guy Johnson, through odd jobs. "Determined to raise him, I had worked as a shake dancer in nightclubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic's shop, taking paint off cars with my hands," she wrote in "Singin' and Swingin'." Elsewhere, she described her short-lived stints as a prostitute and a madam.

Ms. Angelou goes on to recount her marriage to a Greek sailor, Tosh Angelos. (Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married - it appears to have been at least three - for fear, she said, of appearing frivolous.)

After the marriage dissolved, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer and singer under the name Maya Angelou, a variant of her married name. A striking stage presence - she was six feet tall - she occasionally partnered in San Francisco with Alvin Ailey in a nightclub act known as Al and Rita.

She was cast in the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical " House of Flowers," which opened on Broadway in 1954. But she chose instead to tour the world as a featured dancer in a production of "Porgy and Bess" by the Everyman Opera Company, a black ensemble.

Ms. Angelou later settled in New York, where she became active in the Harlem Writers Guild (she hoped to be a poet and playwright), sang at the Apollo and eventually succeeded Bayard Rustin as the coordinator of the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that he, Dr. King and others had founded.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Angelou became romantically involved with Vusumzi L. Make, a South African civil rights activist. She moved with him to Cairo, where she became the associate editor of a magazine, The Arab Observer. After leaving Mr. Make - she found him paternalistic and controlling, she later wrote - she moved to Accra, Ghana, where she was an administrative assistant at the University of Ghana.

On returning to New York, Ms. Angelou helped Malcolm X set up the Organization of Afro-American Unity, established in 1964. The group dissolved after his assassination the next year.

In 1973, Ms. Angelou appeared on Broadway in " Look Away," a two-character play about Mary Todd Lincoln (played by Geraldine Page) and her seamstress. Though the play closed after one performance, Ms. Angelou was nominated for a Tony Award. On the screen, she portrayed Kunta Kinte's grandmother in the 1977 television mini-series " Roots," and appeared in several feature films, including "How to Make an American Quilt" (1995).

Ms. Angelou's marriage in the 1970s to Paul du Feu, who had previously been wed to the feminist writer Germaine Greer, ended in divorce. Survivors include her son, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Some reviewers expressed reservations about Ms. Angelou's memoiristic style, calling it facile and solipsistic. Others criticized her poetry as being little more than prose with line breaks. But her importance as a literary, cultural and historical figure was amply borne out by the many laurels she received, including a spate of honorary doctorates.

Her other books include the volumes of poetry, "Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie" (1971), "Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well" (1975), "And Still I Rise" (1978) and "Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?" (1983).

She released an album of songs, "Miss Calypso," in 1957.

But she remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact because she had never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of "A Song Flung Up to Heaven," Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.

Still planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again.

"You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature," he said. "Almost impossible."

Ms. Angelou replied, "I'll start tomorrow."

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Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South, Dies at 86

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Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow, I will give you no hiding place down here.

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Watch: How to raise a black son in America 

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Watch: How to raise a black son in America 

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Clint Smith: How to raise a black son in America

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As kids, we all get advice from parents and teachers that seems strange, even confusing. This was crystallized one night for a young Clint Smith, who was playing with water guns in a dark parking lot with his white friends. In a heartfelt piece, the poet paints the scene of his father's furious and fearful response.

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REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Nine recent, high-profile cases show the discriminatory practice of redlining is not a thing of the past. It's even spread to your Facebook account.

"Redlining," the practice of banks and real estate agents steering black and Latino families away from predominantly white neighborhoods, is often spoken of in the past tense. We tend to think of it as a vestige of Jim Crow, of a thankfully bygone era when people wore racism on their sleeves and wove it into neighborhood engineering without repercussion.

Some recent cases, however, show that not only is redlining alive today, but that it's also evolved in many cases into racist practices that aren't as detectable as they were during Jim Crow.

Redlining can determine where people of color are able to live or even whether they can have pizza delivered to them. My colleague Laura Bliss has pointed to maps of Baltimore that show redlining effects lingering in the city today. The federal government has been ramping up its investigations of housing discrimination through its Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, a partnership between the U.S. Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The task force says you can count on more redlining cases coming up for investigation, which is starting to freak out some in the housing finance sector.

Cities have been trying to head off the nefarious housing practices and effects, too, with a number filing suits against banks and companies suspected of a variety of steering practices. One common form of this is predatory lending, where banks reserve high-interest loans almost exclusively for people of color, what's sometimes called " reverse redlining."Another comes in the form of a company's refusal to deliver services, like utilities, to neighborhoods with large black and Latino populations.

Below are nine cases that demonstrate what we're talking about here.
The busted:
On September 24, the U.S. Justice Department announced a settlement with Hudson City Savings Bank for close to $33 million after an investigation found that it was avoiding doing mortgage business with African Americans and Latinos between 2009 and 2013. The Justice Department calls it the "largest residential mortgage redlining settlement in its history." As U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman explained to Emily Badger for The Washington Post, "[i]f you lived in a majority-black or Hispanic neighborhood and you wanted to apply for a mortgage, Hudson City Savings Bank was not the place to go." The bank serviced one of the largest housing markets in the nation, covering mortgages throughout New Jersey, New York, and even Philadelphia. But the bank went out of its way not to set up any branches in minority neighborhoods. As part of the settlement, Hudson City will have to open two full-service branches in non-white communities.

On September 10, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman settled with Evans Bank for $825,000 after discovering that the bank erased black neighborhoods from maps used for determining mortgage lending. According to Schneiderman, of the over 1,100 mortgage applications the bank received between 2009 and 2012, only four were from African Americans. The Buffalo News reports that other banks in the area could be flagged next for redlining.

(New York Attorney General Office)

In May, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a $200 million settlement with Associated Bank over redlining in Chicago and Milwaukee. The HUD complaint said that the bank denied mortgage loans to black and Latino applicants between 2008 and 2010. As in the Hudson City case, Associated Bank will have to open new branches in predominantly black and brown communities
The accused:

1. Last year, the city of Miami brought lawsuits against Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup, alleging that the banks were steering black and Latino applicants towards high-interest, "predatory" loans. A federal judge struck those lawsuits down, saying the city lacked standing. A federal appeals reversed that decision, though, on September 2, saying that banks could have foreseen the "attendant harm" that resulted from the predatory lending when they resulted in large numbers of foreclosures throughout the city.

2. Los Angeles filed lawsuits against four banks last year-J. P. Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup-accusing them of both traditional redlining (denying loans to people of color), and also the "reverse redlining" of making predatory loans rain on black and brown communities. The city recently dropped the J. P. Morgan suit. The suits against Bank of America and Wells Fargo are on appeal, while the Citigroup case goes to trial next year. The city says these banks have been engaging in these practices since 2004. Further up the coast, the city of Oakland has also sued Wells Fargo, accusing it of reverse redlining as well.

(LaDale Winling, www.urbanoasis.org)

3. On September 9, the National Fair Housing Alliance filed a discrimination complaint against RE/MAX real estate agents in Jackson, Mississippi. The Alliance sent fake couples out to shop for homes and found that the white testers were sent to predominantly white neighborhoods to view homes while black testers were rarely called out to view homes at all. A September 15 editorial in the The New York Times said the Alliance's findings are indicative of a history of discrimination that has "taken an enormous toll on black wealth."

​​The next generation:

1. The mayors of Jersey City and Newark are concerned that poor, minority neighborhoods haven't been getting their share of fiber-optic quality broadband internet access. Verizon has a contract with the state of New Jersey to deliver this service to the cities. However, as Russell Brandom reports at The Verge, extraordinarily large numbers of households, mostly renters, in Newark and Jersey City have been waiving off rights to the fiber optic service. The mayors are now looking into whether Verizon might be deliberately contributing to the digital divide in the state. Seth Hahn of the Communication Workers of America union told Brandom that a lot of landlords were waived out of the service without their knowledge. Some have been calling it "FioS redlining"-a term that an Urban League director took issue with, claiming that it falsely conflates the Verizon issue with a real history of housing discrimination. It should be noted that Urban League collects healthy sums of funding from Verizon. Here's a graph Brandom created that illustrates the disparities:

(The Verge, Russell Brandom)

2. You might want to start randomly friending some rich trust fund dudes on Facebook. It just might help you get a mortgage loan, especially if you run with a network of modestly compensated real-life friends. As Susie Cagle reported for Pacific Standard last month, a company recently secured a patent that would allow banks to assess a person's creditworthiness by scanning an applicant's Facebook friends. If you're perpetually broke, and you find yourself suddenly getting unfriended by a bunch of loved ones and college buddies, it could be that they're trying to buy a house, and you are a blotch on their Facebook credit. Cagle wryly refers to this as potential "Facebook redlining." Writing about it for The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer detailed a bunch of legal and practical obstacles banks would encounter if they used this Facebook-based system.

Still, if this ends up not flying, there's no reason to think that banks won't find some other application to filter out undesirable borrowers. After all, the history of discrimination in the U.S. is one of metamorphosis.

About the Author

justice editor at Brentin Mock is a staff writer at CityLab. He was previously the Grist.

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Redlining is Alive and Well-and Evolving

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Nine recent, high-profile cases show the discriminatory practice of redlining is not a thing of the past. It's even spread to your Facebook account. "Redlining," the practice of banks and real estate agents steering black and Latino families away from predominantly white neighborhoods, is often spoken of in the past tense.

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This article explores the idea of how white privilege works within the world

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US settles case with bank that had discriminatory lending practices

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US settles case with bank that had discriminatory lending practices

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. authorities reached a settlement with Eagle Bank and Trust Company over allegations that the St. Louis-area bank discriminated against black neighborhoods by not opening branches in those neighborhoods, a practice known as "redlining."

Officials at the U.S. Department of Justice and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been ramping up investigations against banks suspected of discriminatory lending practices.

The case against Eagle Bank is the third discriminatory lending case to be resolved by prosecutors over the past two weeks. The U.S. Justice Department recently settled allegations against Fifth Third Bank and Hudson City Savings Bank. None of the companies admitted to wrongdoing.

"Banks continue to build and structure their lending operations in a way that avoids or fails to meaningfully serve communities of color, based on assumptions about the financial risk," said Vanita Gupta, principal deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.

Over the past 17 years, Eagle Bank and Trust built 11 banks in the St. Louis area, but none were in majority black neighborhoods, Justice Department officials said. As part of the settlement, Eagle Bank agreed to open two new branches in majority African American neighborhoods in north St. Louis and invest $975,000 in banking services for the areas.

In an emailed statement, Eagle Bank's CEO said, "While we disagree with the government's allegations, we also know we must put the best interests of the people we serve above any desire to continue discussions in the hopes of reaching a different outcome."

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white collar crime / fraud / corporate crime

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U.S. settles discriminatory lending case with Eagle Bank

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. authorities reached a settlement with Eagle Bank and Trust Company over allegations that the St. Louis-area bank discriminated against black neighborhoods by not opening branches in those neighborhoods, a practice known as "redlining." Officials at the U.S.

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This video recreates the famous doll test that helped desegregate schools to see if American children have made progress since Brown v. Board

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Children take a test on their attitudes and biases toward race on tonight's "AC360" (10pm ET).

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This article describes hate groups on the rise

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A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center claims the number of hate groups in the U.S. are on the rise, which it blames on terrorist attacks as well as President Trump's rhetoric.

In its annual report on U.S. extremist groups, the Alabama-based nonprofit says the number of hate groups rose from 892 in 2015 to 917 last year, with the number of anti-Muslim groups rising from 34 to 101.

In a conference call with reporters, senior fellow Mark Potok said the increase was due in part to Trump's language about Muslims and his 2015 call for "a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

"Trump's election has been absolutely electrifying to the radical right," Potok said.

The annual report has faced criticism in the past from some of its targets, who argue that it unfairly lumps them with the likes of the Ku Klux Klan, but the SPLC maintains that it defines hate groups as organizations that attack an entire class of people and that use lies or name-calling.

This year's list includes more than 40 chapters of ACT! for America, a group which has pushed for state laws banning Sharia law. ACT! for America says that it is not anti-Muslim, though the SPLC notes that its founder, Brigitte Gabriel, has questioned whether practicing Muslims can be loyal U.S. citizens.

"[ACT! was] claiming 800 chapters [in 2015] and we couldn't find really any activity in those chapters at all, so it seemed like a bogus claim," Potok told TIME. "The reason they came to life was the Syrian refugee crisis. We spent a lot of time verifying that there were real groups on the ground with real leaders."

The SPLC breaks down entries by local chapters "not [as] an effort on our part to swell the numbers," Potok said, but as "an effort to be serious about education people about where these groups are and how large they are." To qualify as a hate group, organizations must exhibit on-the-ground activity that could include rallying, committing crimes, spreading leaflets, accepting memberships or selling literature, he said.

The report also noted a change in how hate groups are organized. Chapters of the Ku Klux Klan shrunk by 32%, which the SPLC said was in part due to the rise of so-called "alt right" groups which are "a recent rebranding of white supremacy for public relations purposes, albeit one that de-emphasizes Klan robes and Nazi symbols in favor of a more 'intellectual' approach."

Here is the full list of the 917 groups, broken down by chapter (* indicates headquarters; some groups have independent state and local branches), that the SPLC designates as hate groups:

Ku Klux Klan

With its long history of violence, the Klan is the most infamous - and oldest - of American hate groups. When the Klan was formed in 1865, it was a single, unitary organization. Today, there are dozens of competing Klan groups. Although black Americans have typically been the Klan's primary target, it has also attacked Jews, immigrants, homosexuals, and Catholics.
Christian American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Cocoa, FL*

Hoxie, AR

Bushnell, FL
Church of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Panama, NY*

Kentucky

Horn Lake, MS

North Carolina
Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Rosedale, MD*

Greenwood, AR

Auburn, IN

Madison, IN

Morehead, KY

Saint Martinville, LA

Sikeston, MO

Vale, NC

Toms River, NJ

Walterboro, SC

Richmond, VA
East Coast Knights Of The True Invisible Empire
Venus, TX*

Nassau, DE

Annapolis, MD

North Carolina

Girardville, PA
Georgia Knight Riders of the Ku Klux Klan
Live Oak, FL
Great Lakes Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Alpena, MI
International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Vanndale, AR*

Cedartown, GA

Mississippi
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Harrison, AR
Knights of the White Disciples
Hudson, FL*

North Carolina
Ku Klos Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Church Hill, TN*

Hazel Green, AL

Vance, AL

Cape Coral, FL

Hudson, FL

Wauchula, FL

Gurnee, IL

Illinois

Indianapolis, IN

Kokomo, IN

Muncie, IN

Indiana

Harrodsburg, KY

Battle Creek, MI

Springfield, MO

Leakesville, MS

Chapel Hill, NC

Sanford, NC

Hempstead, NY

Bally, PA

Butler, TN

Erwin, TN

Hendersonville, TN

Hixson, TN

Knoxville, TN

Lexington, TN

Memphis, TN

Murfreesboro, TN

Ohio

Meadville, PA

Oil City, PA

Gatesville, TX

Texas

Virginia
Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Pelham, NC*

Birmingham, AL

Cullman, AL

Huntsville, AL

Mobile, AL

Montgomery, AL

Anaheim, CA

San Francisco, CA

Jacksonville, FL

Canton, GA

Covington, GA

Dallas, GA

Valdosta, GA

Clay City, IL

Baton Rouge, LA

Trenton, MI

Jackson, MS

Hampton Bays, NY

Columbus, OH

South Carolina

Fort Worth, TX

Danville, VA

Richmond, VA
Militant Knights Ku Klux Klan
Dixonville, PA*

Alabama

Maine

Alpena, MI

Minneapolis, MN

Mississippi

Missouri

New Jersey

New York

Ohio

Gladeville, TN

Flint, TX
Nordic Order Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Dawson Springs, KY*

Alabama
North Mississippi White Knights Of The Ku Klux Klan
Tupelo, MS
Old Dominion Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Virginia
Old Glory Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Vincent, OH
Original Knight Riders Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Beckley, WV
Outlaw Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Ohio
Pacific Coast Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
California*

Spokane, WA
Patriotic Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Gladewater, TX
Rebel Brigade Knights True Invisible Empire
Martinsville, VA
Southern Ohio Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Ohio
Texas Rebel Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Quinlan, TX
Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Park Hills, MO*

Hayden, ID

Pennsylvania
United Dixie White Knights Ku Klux Klan
Leakesville, MS*

Alabama

Illinois

Indiana

Plantersville, MS

North Carolina
United Klans of America
Ashland, AL*

Pennsylvania

McMinnville, TN

Texas
United Northern and Southern Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan
East Ellijay, GA*

California
United White Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan
New Boston, TX
White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of America
Vancouver, WA

Neo-Nazi

These groups share a hatred for Jews and an admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. While they also hate other minorities, homosexuals, and even sometimes Christians, they perceive "the Jew" as their cardinal enemy and trace social problems to a Jewish conspiracy that supposedly controls governments, financial institutions, and the media.
America First Committee
Lyons, IL
American Nazi Party
Westland, MI*

California

West Virginia
Aryan Nations (Louisiana)
Converse, LA
Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC
Wood River, IL*

Alabama

Canton, IL

Taylorville, IL

Grovespring, MO

Ohio

Oklahoma

Tennessee

Wisconsin
Aryan Nations Worldwide
Villa Rica, GA
Aryan Renaissance Society
New York, NY

Tennessee

Texas
Atomwaffen Division
San Antonio, TX
Creativity Movement, The
Bloomington, IL
Daily Stormer, The
Worthington, OH*

Cullman, AL

Phoenix, AZ

Los Angeles, CA

Mountain View, CA

Santa Cruz, CA

Santa Monica, CA

Denver, CO

Brandon, FL

Orlando, FL

Amana, IA

Indianapolis, IN

Louisville, KY

Cambridge, MA

Lowell, MA

Baltimore, MD

St. Louis, MO

Asheville, NC

Charlotte, NC

Raleigh, NC

New York

Las Vegas, NV

Columbus, OH

Pittsburgh, PA

Nashville, TN

Austin, TX

Dallas, TX

Wichita Falls, TX

Burlington, VT

Seattle, WA

Spokane, WA
Einherjar's Honor Wotansvolk
Virginia
Endangered Souls RC/Crew 519
Florida

Idaho
Gallows Tree Wotansvolk Alliance
Grand Rapids, MI*

California

Florida

Indiana

Iowa

Massachusetts

Minnesota

Rhode Island

Texas
Golden Dawn
Astoria, NY
National Alliance
Laurel Bloomery, TN*

neo-nazi cont'd

Hillsboro, WV
National Alliance Reform and Restoration Group
Carson City, NV
National Socialist German Workers Party
Lincoln, NE
National Socialist Movement
Detroit, MI*

Alabama

Tucson, AZ

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

Florida

Georgia

Iowa

Kentucky

Louisiana

Maryland

Mississippi

New Jersey

New York

Ohio

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Tennessee

Texas

Utah

Wyoming
New Order
Milwaukee, WI
Noble Breed Kindred
California
NS Publications
Wyandotte, MI
PzG Inc.
Rapid City, SD
Third Reich Books
Fairbury, NE
Werewolf 88
Pennsylvania
White Aryan Resistance
Warsaw, IN
White Devil Social Club
Wisconsin
Wolfhook Life Clothing
Northern Indiana

White Nationalist

White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of non-whites. Groups listed in several other categories - Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist Skinhead, and Christian Identity - could also be described as white nationalist.
Alternative Right
Atlanta, GA
American Eagle Party
Gatlinburg, TN
American Freedom Party
Los Angeles, CA*

Lakewood Ranch, FL

Indiana County, IN

Montana

Grand Forks, ND

New York, NY

Granbury, TX
American Freedom Union
Hampton Township, PA
American Renaissance/New Century Foundation
Oakton, VA
American Vanguard
Huntington Beach, CA*

Arizona

Northern California

Orlando, FL

Missouri

Nebraska

Ohio

Pennsylvania

Texas

Utah

Virginia

Bremerton, WA
Bob's Underground Graduate Seminar/BUGS
Columbia, SC
Center for Perpetual Diversity
Arlington, VA
Conservative Citizens Foundation, Inc.
Bridgeton, MO
Council of Conservative Citizens
St. Louis, MO*

Eufaula, AL

Silver Spring, MD

New York, NY

Franklin, TN
Counter-Currents Publishing
San Francisco, CA*

New York, NY

Seattle, WA
European American Action Coalition
Pittston, PA
European American Front
Baldwyn, MS
Faith and Heritage
Killeen, TX
Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, The
Vienna, VA
Forza Nuova-USA
New Jersey*

Phoenix, AZ
Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas
Clinton Township, MI
Free American
Tucson, AZ
Heritage and Destiny
Silver Spring, MD
H.L. Mencken Club
Elizabethtown, PA
Identity Evropa
Oakdale, CA
National Policy Institute
Whitefish, MT*

Arlington, VA
Northwest Front
Bremerton, WA
Occidental Dissent
Eufaula, AL
Occidental Observer
Laguna Beach, CA
Occidental Quarterly/Charles Martel Society
Atlanta, GA
Patriotic Flags
Charleston, SC
Phalanx
Washington, DC
Pioneer Little Europe Kalispell Montana
Kalispell, MT
Political Cesspool, The
Bartlett, TN
Racial Nationalist Party of America
Lockport, NY
Radix Journal
Whitefish, MT
Right Stuff, The
New York, NY*

Cincinnati, OH

Columbus, OH

Lehigh County, PA
Scott-Townsend Publishers
Washington, DC
Social Contract Press
Petoskey, MI
Sons & Daughters of Liberty
Florida*

Illinois

Indiana
South Africa Project
Converse, LA
Stormfront
West Palm Beach, FL
Traditionalist Worker Party
Paoli, IN*

Sacramento, CA

Columbus, IN

Kansas

Louisville, KY

Madisonville, KY

Murray, KY

Philadelphia, PA

Dallas, TX

Virginia
Traditionalist Youth Network
Paoli, IN*

Bloomington, IN

Benson, NC

Wisconsin
VDARE Foundation
Warrenton, VA
Washington Summit Publishers
Whitefish, MT
White Boy Society
Illinois*

Kansas

Michigan

Missouri

Wisconsin
White Lives Matter
Texas*

Connecticut

Tennessee
White New York
Rochester, NY
White Rabbit Radio
Dearborn Heights, MI
Wolves of Vinland
Lynchburg, VA*

Colorado

Oregon

Washington

Wyoming
WTM Enterprises
Roanoke, IN

Racist Skinhead

Racist skinheads form a particularly violent element of the white supremacist movement and have often been referred to as the "shock troops" of the hoped-for revolution. The archetypal skinhead look is a shaved head, black boots with red laces, jeans with suspenders, and an array of typically racist tattoos. Skinheads are migratory and often not affiliated with groups.
AC Skins
Atlantic City, NJ
American Front
Oregon

Washington
American Vikings
Indianapolis, IN
Aryan Strikeforce
Phillipsburg, NJ*

Arkansas

Colorado

Kentucky

Massachusetts

Missouri

New York

Ohio

Pennsylvania

Tennessee

Virginia

West Virginia
Be Active Front USA
Maryland

Pennsylvania
Blood and Honour America Division
Washington
Blood and Honour Social Club
Greensboro, NC*

Georgia

Indiana

New York

Ohio

Pennsylvania
California Skinheads
California
Confederate Hammerskins
Florida

Georgia

North Carolina

Nashville, TN

Virginia
Crew 38
California

Florida

Georgia

Idaho

Chicago, IL

Kentucky

Wichita, KS

Maine

Maryland

New Hampshire

North Carolina

Tennessee

Virginia

Washington
Eastern Hammerskins
New Hampshire
Firm 22
Florida

Indiana

New York

Washington
Golden State Skinheads
Northern California

Southern California
Keystone State Skinheads
Harrisburg, PA*

Philadelphia, PA
Maryland State Skinheads
Baltimore, MD
Midland Hammerskins
Wichita, KS

South Dakota
Northern Hammerskins
Chicago, IL

Detroit, MI
Northwestern Hammerskins
Idaho

Oregon

Washington
Sacto Skins
Sacramento, CA
Supreme White Alliance
Ohio*

Florida

Kentucky

Missouri

Pennsylvania

Virginia
Vinland Clothing
Oildale, CA
Vinlanders Social Club
Indiana*

Arizona

California

Florida

Minnesota

North Carolina

Texas
Western Hammerskins
California

Christian Identity

Christian Identity describes a religion that is fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic. It asserts that whites, not Jews, are the true Israelites favored by God in the Bible. In most of its forms, Identity theology depicts Jews as biologically descended from Satan, while non-whites are seen as soulless "mud people" created with the other Biblical "beasts of the field." Some groups listed in other categories, such as the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and several Klan groups, also hold Christian Identity beliefs.
America's Promise Ministries
Sandpoint, ID
Christian American Ministries
Greensburg, LA
Christian Revival Center
Harrison, AR
Church of Israel
Schell City, MO
Covenant People's Ministry
Brooks, GA
Diving International Church of the Web
Morton, IL
Divine Truth Minstries
Bainbridge, OH*

Arkansas
Euro Folk Radio
Chicago, IL
Fellowship of God's Covenant People
Union, KY
Kingdom Identity Ministries
Harrison, AR
Kinsman Redeemer Ministries
Alexandria, KY
Mission to Israel
Scottsbluff, NE
Non-Universal Teaching Ministries
Fostoria, OH
Our Place Fellowship
Colville, WA
Sacred Truth Publishing & Ministries
Mountain City, TN
Scriptures for America Ministries
Laporte, CO
Virginia Publishing Company
Lynchburg, VA
Weisman Publications
Apple Valley, MN
Yahushua Dual Seed Christian Identity Ministry
Livingston, TX
Yahweh's Truth
Linwood, MI

Neo-Confederate

Many groups celebrate traditional Southern culture and the Civil War's dramatic conflict between the Union and the Confederacy. But neo-Confederate groups go further and embrace racist attitudes toward blacks and white separatism. Neo-Confederate groups seek to revive many of the racist principles of the antebellum South.
ACTBAC NC
Snow Camp, NC
Dixie Republic
Traveler's Rest, SC
FreeMississippi
Perkinston, MS
League of the South
Killen, AL*

Anniston, AL

Tuscaloosa, AL

Wetumpka, AL

Harrison, AR

Jacksonville, FL

Lake City, FL

Miami, FL

Macon, GA

Ft. Mitchell, KY

London, KY

Taylorsville, KY

Logansport, LA

Clements, MD

West Plains, MO

Tupelo, MS

Wilmington, NC

Aiken, SC

Lobelville, TN

Conroe, TX

La Porte, TX

Waxahachie, TX

Winchester, VA
Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation
Lobelville, TN
Pace Confederate Depot
Baldwyn, MS
Southern Future
Aiken, SC
Southern National Congress
Alexandria, VA*

Wetumpka, AL

Arkansas

Jacksonville, FL

Morganton, GA

Fruit Hill, KY

Louisiana

Maryland

Mississippi

West Plains, MO

North Carolina

Travelers Rest, SC

Tennessee

Texas

Black Separatist

Black separatist groups are organizations whose ideologies include tenets of racially based hatred. These groups typically oppose integration and racial intermarriage, and want separate institutions - or even a separate nation - for blacks. Most forms of black separatism are strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.
All Eyes on Egipt Bookstore
Brooklyn, NY*

Orlando, FL

Decatur, GA

Macon, GA

Monticello, GA

Chicago, IL

Dorchester, MA

Detroit, MI

Cleveland, OH
Black Riders Liberation Party
Los Angeles, CA*

Oakland, CA

San Diego, CA

Miami, FL

Chicago, IL

Detroit, MI

New York, NY

Portland, OR

Virginia
Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, The
New York, NY*

Washington, DC

Fort Myers, FL

Miami, FL

Orlando, FL

West Palm Beach, FL

Baltimore, MD

Minneapolis, MN

Greensboro, NC

Omaha, NE

Jersey City, NJ

Philadelphia, PA

Oklahoma City, OK

Portland, OR

Allentown, PA

Pittsburgh, PA
Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge
Baltimore, MD*

Los Angeles, CA

Rialto, CA

Washington, DC

black separtist cont'd

Miami, FL

Atlanta, GA

Chicago, IL

Indianapolis, IN

Detroit, MI

Minneapolis, MN

St. Louis, MO

North Carolina

New York, NY

Syracuse, NY

Oklahoma

Portland, OR

Philadelphia, PA

Texas

Seattle, WA
Israel United In Christ
Mount Vernon, NY*

Birmingham, AL

Phoenix, AZ

Los Angeles, CA

Denver, CO

Washington, DC

Miami, FL

Orlando, FL

Tallahassee, FL

Atlanta, GA

Chicago, IL

Kansas City, KS

Louisville, KY

New Orleans, LA

Boston, MA

Detroit, MI

St. Louis, MO

Charlotte, NC

Newark, NJ

Las Vegas, NV

Bronx, NY

Heath, OH

Oregon

Warr Acres, OK

Pittsburgh, PA

Memphis, TN

Austin, TX

Corpus Christi, TX

Dallas, TX

Houston, TX

San Antonio, TX

Hampton, VA
Nation of Islam
Chicago, IL*

Birmingham, AL

Huntsville, AL

Mobile, AL

Montgomery, AL

Pine Bluff, AR

Phoenix, AZ

Compton, CA

Los Angeles, CA

Oakland, CA

Rialto, CA

San Diego, CA

Stockton, CA

Denver, CO

Washington, DC

Wilmington, DE

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Gainesville, FL

Miami, FL

Pensacola, FL

Pine Hills, FL

Saint Petersburg, FL

Tampa, FL

Atlanta, GA

Augusta, GA

Brunswick, GA

Columbus, GA

East Saint Louis, IL

Rockford, IL

Indianapolis, IN

Lexington, KY

Louisville, KY

Baton Rouge, LA

Monroe, LA

New Orleans, LA

Shreveport, LA

Boston, MA

Springfield, MA

Baltimore, MD

Benton Harbor, MI

Detroit, MI

Grand Rapids, MI

Kansas City, MO

St. Louis, MO

Holly Springs, MS

Southaven, MS

Charlotte, NC

Durham, NC

Greensboro, NC

Raleigh, NC

Winston-Salem, NC

Camden, NJ

Newark, NJ

New Brunswick, NJ

Plainfield, NJ

Willingboro, NJ

Brooklyn, NY

Buffalo, NY

Harlem, NY

Rochester, NY

Akron, OH

Cleveland, OH

Columbus, OH

Dayton, OH

Tulsa, OK

Harrisburg, PA

Philadelphia, PA

Pittsburgh, PA

Charleston, SC

Columbia, SC

Greenville, SC

Chattanooga, TN

Memphis, TN

Austin, TX

Dallas, TX

Fort Worth, TX

Houston, TX

Texarkana, TX

Norfolk, VA

Richmond, VA

Milwaukee, WI
New Black Panther Party
Houston, TX*

Los Angeles, CA

Washington, DC

Jacksonville, FL

Miami, FL

Tampa, FL

Tallahassee, FL

Atlanta, GA

Augusta, GA

Waycross, GA

Springfield, IL

Louisville, KY

St. Louis, MO

Hattiesburg, MS

Newark, NJ

Dayton, OH

Nashville, TN

Dallas, TX

Tomball, TX

Virginia Beach, VA
New Black Panther Party for Self Defense
Stone Mountain, GA*

New Haven, CT

Tampa Bay, FL
Sicarii 1715
San Diego, CA*

Inland Empire, CA

Seattle, WA
War On The Horizon
Washington, DC

Anti-LGBT

Opposition to equal rights for LGBT people has been a central theme of Christian Right organizing and fundraising for the past four decades. These groups are not listed on the basis of opposition to same-sex marriage or the belief that the Bible describes homosexual activity as sinful. Anti-LGBT groups engage in crude name-calling and disseminate disparaging propaganda and falsehoods about this population, such as the claim that gay men molest children at vastly higher rates than straight men.
Abiding Truth Ministries
Springfield, MA
Alliance Defending Freedom
Scottsdale, AZ
American College of Pediatricians
Gainesville, FL
American Family Association
Tupelo, MS*

Franklin, PA
Americans for Truth About Homosexuality
Naperville, IL
American Vision
Powder Springs, GA
ATLAH World Missionary Church (All The Land Anointed Holy)
New York, NY
Campus Ministry USA, The
Terre Haute, IN
Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM)
Washington, DC

New York, NY
Chalcedon Foundation
Vallecito, CA
Citizens for Community Values
Cincinnati, OH
Conservative Republicans of Texas
Houston, TX
D. James Kennedy Ministries (formerly Truth in Action)
Fort Lauderdale, FL
Faith Baptist Church (formerly Sons of Thundr)
Greenville, GA
Faith2Action
North Royalton, OH
Faithful Word Baptist Church
Tempe, AZ
Family Research Council
Washington, DC
Family Research Institute
Colorado Springs, CO
Family Watch International
Gilbert, AZ
Generations With Vision
Elizabeth, CO
Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (H.O.M.E.)
Downers Grove, IL
Illinois Family Institute
Carol Stream, IL
Illinois Family Institute Tri-County chapter
Peoria, IL
Liberty Counsel
Orlando, FL
Mass Resistance
Waltham, MA*

Torrance, CA

Lewiston, ME

St. Louis, MO

Yorktown, VA
Mission: America
Columbus, OH
Pacific Justice Institute
Sacramento, CA
Pass the Salt Ministries
Hebron, OH
Pilgrims Covenant Church
Monroe, WI
Pray in Jesus Name Project, The
Colorado Springs, CO
Probe Ministries
Plano, TX
Providence Road Baptist Church
Maiden, NC
Public Advocate of the United States
Falls Church, VA
Ruth Institute
San Marcos, CA
Save California
Sacramento, CA
Stedfast Baptist Church
Fort Worth, TX
TC Family (Traverse City Family)
Traverse City, MI
Tom Brown Ministries
El Paso, TX
Traditional Values Coalition
Washington, DC*

Anaheim, CA
True Light Pentecost Church
Spartanburg, SC
United Families International
Gilbert, AZ
Verity Baptist Church
Sacramento, CA
Westboro Baptist Church
Topeka, KS
Windsor Hills Baptist Church
Oklahoma City, OK
World Congress of Families/Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society
Rockford, IL

Anti-Muslim

Anti-Muslim hate groups are a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, most of them appearing in the aftermath of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Earlier anti-Muslim groups tended to be religious in orientation and disputed Islam's status as a respectable religion. Anti-Muslim groups listed here exhibit extreme hostility towards Muslims and attribute to Islam's followers an inherent set of negative traits.
III% Security Force
Henry County, GA
ACT for America
Virginia Beach, VA*

Jonesboro, AR

Tucson, AZ

Corona, CA

Los Angeles, CA

Mission Viejo, CA

Colorado

Cheshire, CT

Connecticut

Bear, DE

Brevard County, FL

Heathrow, FL

Jacksonville, FL

Palm Beach, FL

Des Moines, IA

Meridian, ID

Twin Falls, ID

Des Plaines, IL

Baton Rouge, LA

Boston, MA

Detroit, MI

Grand Rapids, MI

Minneapolis, MN

Ste. Genevieve, MO

St. Louis, MO

Lake County, MT

Kalispell, MT

Stillwater County, MT

Whitehall, MT

Fayetteville, NC

Nashua, NH

Brooklyn, NY

Long Island, NY

Cleveland, OH

Cincinnati, OH

Columbus, OH

Rapid City, SD

Knoxville, TN

Memphis, TN

Dallas, TX

Houston, TX

San Antonio, TX

Leesburg, VA

Pierce County, WA

Spokane Valley, WA
Altra Firearms
Jackson Center, PA
American Constitution Center
Nashville, TN
American Freedom Alliance
Los Angeles, CA
American Freedom Defense Initiative
New York, NY
American Freedom Law Center
Ann Arbor, MI
American Security Rally of Montana
Helena, MT
Bare Naked Islam
Marina del Rey, CA
Bomb Islam
Phoenix, AZ
Bosch Fawstin
New York, NY
Bureau on American Islamic Relations
Irving, TX
Center for Security Policy
Washington, DC
Christian Action Network
Forest, VA
Citizens for National Security
Boca Raton, FL
Citizen Warrior
Nashville, TN
Clarion Project
Washington, DC
Committee to End the CSI Refugee Center
Buhl, ID
Counter Jihadist Coalition of Southern California
Santa Monica, CA
Crusaders, The
Garden City, KS
David Horowitz Freedom Center
Los Angeles, CA
Faith Freedom
Bellevue, WA
Family Security Matters
Washington, DC
Fortress of Faith
Bellingham, WA
Foundation for Advancing Christian Truth
Bronx, NY
Islamthreat.com
Pleasant Hill, CA
Jihad Watch
Sherman Oaks, CA
Keep South Dakota Safe PAC
Aberdeen, SC
Lincoln County Citizen Action Network
Fayetteville, TN
Pig Blood Bullets
Priest River, ID
Political Islam
Nashville, TN
Radio Jihad/Global Patriot Radio
New York
Refugee Resettlement Watch
Fairplay, MD
Religious Awareness Network
Washington, DC
Secure Michigan
New Baltimore, MI
Shoebat Foundation, The
Newtown, PA
Silver Bullet Gun Oil
Courtland, VA
Soldiers of Odin
Flagstaff, AZ

California

Colorado

Illinois

Indiana

New Hampshire

North Carolina

Cleveland, OH

Ohio

Tennessee

Texas
Stop the Islamization of the World
Houston, TX
Straight Way and More, The
Venice, FL
Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
New York, NY
Team America Political Action Committee
Littleton, CO
Treasure Valley Refugee Watch
Meridian, ID
Truth in Love Project
Chattaroy, WA
Understanding the Threat
Vienna, VA
United West, The
Lake Worth, FL
Virginia Christian Alliance
Henrico, VA

General Hate

These organizations are subdivided into anti-immigrant, hate music, Holocaust denial, and radical traditional Catholic groups. A final "other" sub-category includes groups espousing a variety of hateful doctrines.

ANTI-IMMIGRANT (14)
American Border Patrol
Sierra Vista, AZ
American Immigration Control Foundation/Americans for Immigration Control
Monterey, VA
Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC)
Raleigh, NC
Borderkeepers of Alabama
Birmingham, AL
Californians for Population Stabilization
Santa Barbara, CA
Center for Immigration Studies
Washington, DC
Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform
Lakewood, CO
Federation for American Immigration Reform
Washington, DC
Immigration Reform Law Institute
Washington, DC
Legal Immigrants for America
Winter Springs, FL
National Coalition for Immigration Reform (formerly CCIR)
Huntington Beach, CA
New Yorkers for Immigration Control and Enforcement (NYICE)
New York, NY
ProEnglish
Arlington, VA
US Border Guard
Mesa, AZ
HATE MUSIC (16) American Defense Records
Lexington, KY
Behold Barbarity Records & Distro
Plymouth, MN
Hate Crime Streetwear Productions
Anaheim, CA
Hostile Class Productions
Burbank, IL
ISD Records
Denison, TX
Label 56
Nottingham, MD
Micetrap Distribution
Maple Shade Township, NJ
MSR Productions
Wheat Ridge, CO
NSM88 Records
Detroit, MI
Poker Face
Allentown, PA
Resistance Records
Chicago, IL
Soleilmoon Recordings
Portland, OR
Stahlhelm Records
Milwaukee, WI
Tightrope
Calico Rock, AR
United Riot Records
New York, NY
Wolf Tyr Productions
Holbrook, NY

HOLOCAUST DENIAL (10)
Barnes Review/Foundation for Economic Liberty, Inc.
Upper Marlboro, MD
Campaign for Radical Truth in History
Coeur d'Alene, ID
carolynyeager.net
Kerrville, TX
Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
San Diego, CA*

York, PA
Deir Yassin Remembered
Geneva, NY*

Ann Arbor, MI
Institute for Historical Review
Newport Beach, CA
Irving Books
Key West, FL
Realist Report, The
Poway, CA

RADICAL TRADITIONAL CATHOLIC (14)
Catholic Counterpoint
Broomall, PA
Catholic Family News/Catholic Family Ministries, Inc.
Niagara Falls, NY
Christ or Chaos
West Chester, OH
Culture Wars/Fidelity Press
South Bend, IN
Fatima Crusader, The/International Fatima Rosary Crusade
Constable, NY
IHM Media
Richmond, NH
IHS Press
Norfolk, VA
In the Spirit of Chartres Committee
Carrollton, VA
Most Holy Family Monastery
Fillmore, NY
OMNI Christian Book Club
Palmdale, CA
Remnant, The/The Remnant Press
Forest Lake, MN

general hate cont'd
Robert Sungenis
State Line, PA
Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Richmond, NH
Tradition in Action
Los Angeles, CA

OTHER (46)
a2z Publications
Las Vegas, NV
Active Democracy
Washington, DC
Aggressive Christianity
Fence Lake, NM*

Berino, NM
American Clarion
Rapid City, SD
American Free Press
Washington, DC
As-Sabiqun
Washington, DC*

Los Angeles, CA

Oakland, CA

Sacramento, CA

San Diego, CA

Philadelphia, PA
Bill Keller Ministries
St. Petersburg, FL
Brother Nathanael Foundation, The
Frisco, CO
Chick Publications
Ontario, CA
Christian Anti-Defamation Commission
Vista, CA
Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement
Framingham, MA
Cultural Studies Press
New York, NY
European-American Evangelistic Crusades
Sheridan, CA
Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints
Hildale, UT*

Colorado City, AZ

Custer, SD

Pringle, SD
Holy Nation of Odin
Kingsburg, CA
Insight USA
Longwood, FL
Invictus Books
Wentzville, MO
Jamaat al-Muslimeen
Baltimore, MD
Jewish Defense League
Los Angeles, CA
Jewish Task Force
Fresh Meadows, NY
Lordship Church
Coeur d'Alene, ID
Masjid al Islam
Oakland, CA
National Prayer Network
Clackamas, OR
Official Street Preachers
Los Angeles, CA
Ozark Craft LC
Harrison, AR
Power of Prophecy
Austin, TX
Reformation-Bible Puritan-Baptist Church/Vatican Assassins
Newmanstown, PA
Rense Radio Network
Ashland, OR
Repent Amarillo
Amarillo, TX
Samanta Roy Institute of Science and Technology
Shawano, WI
Sharkhunters International
Hernando, FL
Sons of Liberty Media (formerly You Can Run But You Cannot Hide)
Annandale, MN
Tony Alamo Christian Ministries
Fouke, AR*

Fort Smith, AR

Canyon Country, CA

Santa Clarita, CA

New York, NY

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This article explores how people deal with casual racism.

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There's been a lot of conversation lately about people of color dealing with " only one in the room" syndrome in the workplace. But in 2016, it's still remarkably easy to be the only person of color in any given social situation. My Code Switch teammate Gene Demby and I were talking about this yesterday. We've both been to parties in D.C., Philadelphia, LA - all majority nonwhite cities - where we at some point looked up and realized we were "the only one in the room." We live in Chocolate City, for goodness' sake! How are we ending up at all these potlucks with nary another person of color around?

Turns out, it's pretty easy. As the Washington Post's Christopher Ingraham put it, writing about a study on race and social circles released last year, "the average black person's friend network is eight percent white, but the average white person's network is only one percent black. To put it another way: Blacks have ten times as many black friends as white friends. But white Americans have an astonishing 91 times as many white friends as black friends."

On Friday, Rajini Vaidyanathan of BBC News wrote about housing segregation in the United States. According to the Brookings Institution study that he references, "more than half of blacks would have to move to achieve complete integration." Predictably, housing segregation leads to racially distinct social spaces even in the nation's most ostensibly diverse cities, and not just when it comes to schools or offices:

"In my reporting across the United States I've seen this first hand - from Louisiana to Kansas, Alabama to Wisconsin, Georgia to Nebraska. In so many of these places people of other races simply don't mix, not through choice but circumstance. And if there's no interaction between races, it's harder for conversations on how to solve race problems to even begin."

This separation, Vaidyanathan says, isn't an accident; it's the end result of decades of governmental discrimination; from redlining, racial covenants and blockbusting. "Decades on from the civil rights movement, many black and white Americans simply don't mix," he writes. "And as the U.S. contends with race problems, getting to know each other better is one step in understanding and fixing some of those problems."

The consequences of housing segregation can be severe. Gene has written about the effects segregation can have on life expectancy, education and incarceration rates.

They can also be intimate and nebulous, and pop up in the most unexpected places, like a holiday party or a Sunday brunch. Statistically speaking, this isn't that surprising.

Over at the Toast, Nicole Chung recently wrote about what it feels like to encounter casual racism in a room full of white friends and family members. Chung was at a post-Christmas dinner at her in-laws' when an acquaintance leaned over the dinner table to share her observation that Chung looks "just like everyone on that show" - Fresh Off the Boat - leaving Chung grasping for words. She hoped that someone would step in and say something, and when no one did, she realized that the pressure to "make sure everyone keeps having a good time" was on her:

"The social pressure on people of color to keep the peace, not get mad, just make sure everyone keeps having a nice time - even when we hear these remarks in public, at our workplaces and schools, in our own homes and from our friends' mouths - can be overwhelming, bearing down on us in so many situations we do not see coming and therefore cannot avoid. What does our dignity matter, what do our feelings amount to, when we could embarrass white people we care about? When our white relatives or friends or colleagues might experience a moment's discomfort, anxiety, or guilt?"

Reading Chung's piece reminded me of a potluck I was at in Philadelphia last summer with my then-boyfriend, who is white, and his crew of white friends. I had gotten back from the beach a few days earlier and was several shades darker than usual. Everyone was busy gossiping about their summer adventures when one guy turned to me and asked, "So, did he realize you were black when he started dating you?"

In that moment, my instinct was to say something snarky ("Did he realize you were a doofus when he became your friend?"). But like Chung, I didn't want to ruin a good time. So I laughed, poured myself a drink, and let everyone move on.

In the scheme of things, did I experience that socially awkward interaction as a trauma on the scale of white-flight-induced school budget shortages, or the redlining-driven concentration of poverty in black neighborhoods? Of course not. But if we're going to have conversations on the effects of housing segregation, it's worth understanding how the accumulation of decades of racially driven policy may have leached into every aspect of our lives, and how a thorough scrubbing may be in store.

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Where Brunch And Housing Segregation Collide

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Norman Rockwell's painting "The Problem We All Live With" depicting Ruby Bridges - the first black child to attend an all white elementary school in the South. Image from the website of the Norman Rockwell Museum.

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BOTH A map of racial segregation in America  

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BOTH A map of racial segregation in America  

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__KEY - White: blue dots; African American: green dots; Asian: red; Latino: orange; all others: brown __

Last year, a pair of researchers from Duke University published a report with a bold title: " The End of the Segregated Century." U.S. cities, the authors concluded, were less segregated in 2012 than they had been at any point since 1910. But less segregated does not necessarily mean integrated-something this incredible map makes clear in vivd color.

The map, created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, is stunningly comprehensive. Drawing on data from the 2010 U.S. Census, it shows one dot per person, color-coded by race. That's 308,745,538 dots in all-around 7 GB of visual data. It isn't the first map to show the country's ethnic distribution, nor is it the first to show every single citizen, but it is the first to do both, making it the most comprehensive map of race in America ever created.

>This is the most comprehensive map of race in America ever created.

White people are shown with blue dots; African-Americans with green; Asians with red; and Latinos with orange, with all other race categories from the Census represented by brown. Since the dots are smaller than pixels at most zoom levels, Cable assigned shades of color based on the multiple dots therein. From a distance, for example, certain neighborhoods will look purple, but zooming-in reveals a finer-grained breakdown of red and blue-or, really, black and white.

"There are a lot of moving parts in this process, so this can cause different shades of color to appear at different zoom levels in really dense areas, like you see in NYC," Cable explains. "I played around with dot size and transparency for a while and settled on the current scheme as being adequate." You can read more about Cable's methodology here, but it comes down to this: When you're dealing with 300 million dots at varying levels of zoom, getting the presentation just right is as much an art as a science.

Looking at the map, every city tells a different story. In California, for example, major cities aren't just diverse, they're integrated to a great degree, too. We see large swaths of Sacramento dotted variously with reds, blues, oranges, greens and browns. Los Angeles is more distinctly clustered, but groups still bleed into one another.

In the Midwest, though, the racial divide can be shockingly exact. In Chicago, bands of whites, blacks, and Latinos radiate out from the city center like sun beams. In St. Louis, a buffer of a few blocks separates a vast area of largely black citizens from another of white and Asian ones. In Detroit, the most segregated city in America according to one recent study, there's no buffer at all. We see how 8 Mile Road serves as the dividing line between two largely homogenous swaths-one predominantly white and one predominantly black.

But the map doesn't just tell us about distinct cities. Cable points out how the area comprising the Northwest Territory-Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota-sees a good deal of population distributed by major roadways, as opposed to the states in the East where the populations often developed along natural features (compare the sweep of dots in Eastern Pennsylvania to the same area in this detailed map of the area's rivers).

Looking at the Southeast, a wide, faint band of green represents the Black Belt, a region originally named for the dark soil in Alabama and Mississippi that eventually came to describe the greater region shaped by plantation agriculture. And while the West looks awfully barren, the density of cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, and Houston gives us a sense of why those states are actually so populous.

Responding to the Duke University study last year, experts were quick to expound on the complexities of the issue. Housing desegregation, one pointed out, is not a magic bullet for equal opportunity. Another made clear that blacks remained more segregated from whites than Latinos or Asians. Here, at least, Cable's given us a chance to see how things stand today in greater detail than ever before.

Check out the full, interactive map for yourself here.

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The Best Map Ever Made of America's Racial Segregation

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KEY - White: blue dots; African American: green dots; Asian: red; Latino: orange; all others: brown __ Last year, a pair of researchers from Duke University published a report with a bold title: " The End of the Segregated Century." U.S. cities, the authors concluded, were less segregated in 2012 than they had been at any point since 1910.

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Great Migration - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Watch author Maya Angelou read an inspiring poem.