Unsettling Scores
A complex racial schism threatens to dismantle the signs of academic progress in the Mount Vernon, N.Y., district.
Walking every block in this community, they went door to door rallying residents with a stark message: Mount Vernon schools are rife with nepotism, cronyism, and racism. African-American children are failing. Blacks are denied a fair share of school jobs and contracts.
Claiming that the all-white school board and the white superintendent served as the political arm of the city's Italian-American civic association, African-American ministers and activists mounted a grassroots effort that led to the ouster of every white member of the school board by 1999. Today, every school board member in this densely populated suburb of New York City is black. And, for the first time, so is its superintendent.
Some call the community-mobilization effort a modern-day civil rights movement. Others believe gullible voters were deceived by an onslaught...
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