BLACK JUDGES DISCUSS ISSUES

Conference Looks At Racial Progress

More than 100 black judges from across the country filled a downtown hotel
banquet room Saturday to discuss "Modern Day Civil Rights Issues."

Panelists from Harvard and The Ohio State University law schools, the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund, the Equal Justice Society and Saul Green, the
collaborative agreement monitor who tracks reform efforts by the Cincinnati
Police Department, said the issues today are much they same as they were
years ago.

"It's ironic to call it modern day because some of the issues are very
old," said Charles J. Ogletree Jr., director of the Charles Hamilton
Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.

Ogletree immediately posed the question: Why are civil rights still an
important issue?

Attorney Theodore M. Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said,
"We are only three decades out from the error of segregation that was
sanctioned and legalized discrimination. Put that 35 years or so up against
the 386 years since the arrival of African-Americans at Jamestown,
obviously we're just starting to wrestle with our legacy."

Shaw said there are four areas of civil rights concern: education, criminal
justice, political participation and voting rights and the economic
well-being of communities.

Much of the panel focused on the criminal justice system.

"There is a school-prison pipeline," Shaw said. "It exists, look at the
5-year-old black girl in Florida who was taken out of school in handcuffs
because she had a temper tantrum. That gives you a sense how some people
see young black children."

The criminal justice system continues to incarcerate millions of
African-Americans for non-violent drug offenses, Shaw said.

"We have to find a better way," Shaw said. "The war on drugs has become the
war on black people."

Green said in many cities, including Cincinnati, people must find a better
way to respond to violent crime.

"It is often knee-jerk - more police, more arrests, more enforcement,"
Green said. "All that does is result in more incarceration."

Green said the white community is satisfied with policing, but a distrust
of police remains in the black community.

He said Cincinnati's greatest test will come after the collaborative
agreement ends next year.

Eva Patterson, president of the Equal Justice Society, a group dedicated to
advancing innovative legal strategies and public policy for enduring social
change, said there has been progress.

"When I went to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, I was
feeling the energy of ancestors," she said. "I think they would be well
pleased to see us here.

"But you have to be blind to look at state of African-Americans in this
country and say everything is fine."