Ending her talk show after a quarter-century “feels right in my bones and right in my spirit,” Oprah Winfrey told her studio audience at the end of the taping of Friday’s show.

Oprah, one of the most powerful women in the world, had promised a statement Friday after news broke Thursday that she was pulling the plug on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2011.

“It’s exactly the right time,” she said, at times tearful.

Picture courtesy of  Harpo Productions

“For some of you long-time Oprah viewers, you have literally grown up with me. You have your family and you raised your children and you left a spot for me in your morning and afternoon.”

But the 55-year-old entertainer’s inspirational message, like her media empire, will just keep expanding, a message on www.oprah.com said Friday afternoon.

A link from the site to her next venture, the cable Oprah Winfrey Network, or OWN, declared: “For an hour a day, she’s been bringing `live your best life’ television right into your living room. Well now it’s time for what’s next. Not just what’s next for Oprah, but what’s next for you. The Oprah Winfrey Network will be a 24/7 cable network devoted to self-discovery, to connecting you to your best self and to the world. Oprah will be with us every day. She’s the life force of OWN.”

The network will launch in January 2011, and a number of executives from her daily TV show have already signed on to the new venture, according to www.oprah.com.

Platinum Tears hasn’t seen Oprah on TV screens for years so this won’t be a huge adjustment nevertheless we believe that it’s truly the end of a huge era but the decades she has been on the Talkshow Queen she has been a positive role model for the human race and truly inspirational and will continue to do so by going forward and owning all aspects of how she does this, bless you Oprah. For daily inspirations go to Oprah.com where you can see interviews with Jay-Z amongst others extracted from her O magazine.

School desegregation was the most powerful and most effective tool ever implemented by the federal government to close the achievement gap.  Where correctly carried out, it benefitted students of all races, lowered residential segregation, and pushed our society closer to the ideology of the American dream.  Unfortunately, mandatory desegregation continues to be politically untenable today, if not so much as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.  Hochschild and Scovronick (2003) casually suggest that many Whites oppose desegregation because they do not want their children to face increased competition for wealth and prestige.  The authors quickly dismiss this argument, writing, “but if they believe in the American dream, they cannot legitimately complain about that.”  Though it seems probable that White reluctance is at least partially based on such fear, there are many other powerful circumstances that led to the cessation of desegregation programs, such as the rise of Black Power and White backlash against it, Supreme Court rulings, public frustration with the process of integration, and the geo-historical contexts in which they were carried out.  A review of the historical record will show that desegregation policies were effective and could be again.

There were many benefits of school desegregation policies.  Perhaps most importantly, “[d]esegregation has harmed no group and has helped African Americans to pursue their dreams” (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003).  While recognizing that how and where a program is implemented matters,[1] Hochschild and Scovronick provide numerous statistics that illuminate the success of desegregation.  The authors also point out that in some cases desegregation has led to greater residential integration and that children who have gone to integrated schools are much more likely to live integrated lives as adults.  The topic of Hochschild and Scovronick’s book is the American dream and they neatly tie that theme into their desegregation arguments, writing, “[e]nding legal segregation in schools and other public facilities, fostering real, not just legal, desegregation, did more to move the American dream from ideology to practice than has any other public policy or private effort” (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003).

One reason that desegregation policy was ended concerns the rise of the Black Power movement and the White backlash that followed.  As early as 1965, organizations that had previously fought alongside Whites for civil rights began to “move towards black separatism” (Orfield, 1988).  In the late 1960s, a common public misapprehension was that Blacks had begun working towards building up their own communities and no longer valued interaction with Whites in society or schools.  Many White supporters felt rejected, while in reality, the movement “never had a substantial mass following in the black community” (Orfield, 1988).  The combination of such perceptions with widespread rioting during the summers of the Johnson Administration led to major White backlash against all policies meant to help Blacks or to bring Blacks and Whites closer together.

Federal and State courts have had an immense and direct impact on the decline of desegregation programs.[2] The federal judicial role can be traced to Milliken v. Bradley (1974), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that desegregation plans could not include busing across school district lines, effectively isolating the Black cities from the White suburbs.  Referring back to Hochschild’s point about the importance of quality implementation, the Milliken decision doomed many desegregation plans from their very inceptions.  In the 1990s the courts’ decisions have made the standards for achieving unity[3] much more lenient.  Examples include Freeman v. Pitts (1992), which held that school districts could stop desegregation programs even if the goals established in Green had not been reached, and Jenkins v. Kansas City (1995), which stated that improved test scores are not a requirement for establishing unitary status.  In 1954 Brown v. Board overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessey v. Ferguson (1896).  Unfortunately, the goal toward which many educators and politicians have been reaching has weakened since Milliken, leaving them effectively striving for Plessey instead of Brown.

Another reason for the end of desegregation is that the public expected the process of integrating American society to be easier, and was so dismayed by the difficulties that it abandoned the effort.  After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, many believed that, with legal discrimination squelched, there was no reason that Blacks and Whites could not live in harmony.  This was especially the case for Northerners who saw people in the South as the perpetrators of segregation and inequality while failing to recognize the symptoms of racism in their own states.  Orfield (1988) provides a non-education example that is nonetheless illuminating, writing that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) ended its racist housing policies around 1967, but no plan was ever proposed to remedy the tens of thousands of segregated neighborhoods those policies had previously produced.  It was generally assumed, or at least hoped, that once legal barriers were removed the problem would solve itself.  When this first round of remedies to inequality had been found lacking, combined with the previously mentioned suspicion of Black Power and fear from the riots, the White public was loath to keep working towards the worthy goal of school desegregation.

The final obstacle faced by desegregation programs was caused by the reality of geographic, historic, and cultural differences between the North and the South.  As was previously mentioned, Northerners were quick to place the responsibility for inequality on the South, as well as the onus for solving the problem.  Justices who made relevant rulings did nothing to dispel this notion, and often compounded it, drawing stark lines between de jure and de facto segregation that Hochschild and Scovronick point out are not so “concrete” as the federal judiciary would have us believe.  “Although segregation by individual decision and social practice were widespread in the North, the courts never assumed responsibility to remedy it” (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003).  Simple geography also made a difference.  In the South, where most school districts were large enough to contain both urban and suburban populations, busing could actually reduce transportation time and costs.  When similar programs were implemented in the fragmented school districts of Northern metropolitan areas, the realities were quite different.

[2] The fact that Nixon appointed four Supreme Court justices during his presidency led to a conservative court.

[3] Six areas in which desegregation was to be achieved were established in Green v. New Kent County (1968): student assignment, faculty, staff, transportation, extra curricular activities, and facilities.

Lilian Bader was born in Liverpool. Her father was from Barbados and had served with the Royal Navy, her mother was white and from England. Lilian was orphaned at the age of 9 and lived in a convent until she was 21. She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) at the beginning of 1941. In December 1941, Lilian became a Leading Aircraftwoman (LACW) and soon gained the rank of Acting Corporal. During the war she married a black soldier named Ramsay Bader and in February 1944 she left the WAAF. The couple had two sons and she later trained to become a teacher.

 Athlete, Entrepreneur, and political colossus pre WW2

 Dr Harold Moody led the first effective black pressure groups in this country, the League of Coloured Peoples.

 Equiano was an African writer whose experiences as a slave prompted him to become involved in the British abolition movement.

In his autobiography, Olaudah Equiano writes that he was born in the Eboe province, in the area that is now southern Nigeria. He describes how he was kidnapped with his sister at around the age of 11, sold by local slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to Barbados and then Virginia.

Martin Robison Delany (May 6, 1812 – January 24, 1885) was an African-American abolitionist and arguably the first proponent of American black nationalism. He became the first African American field officer in the United States Army during the Civil War.

For more information go to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Delany