Bernice King will now lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization her father, Martin Luther King, Jr., co-founded

From The Grio:

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced her election as its eighth president Friday morning. Interim President Byron Clay called King and said she accepted the position.

“In the spirit of your father, Martin Luther King Jr., we look forward with anticipation to your leadership,” Clay told King, 46, as reporters listened to his end of the conversation.

She could be heard responding, “Thank you very much.”

“SCLC is a great organization with a rich history,” Clay told reporters. “She is excited. I am excited. The nation will be excited.”

Medgar Evers, a civil-rights hero who was assassinated for his efforts to register Black voters in Mississippi in the 1960’s will have a U.S Navy Ship named in his honor.

Sadly, it was Evers’ death that prompted President Kennedy to pursue a civil rights bill and began the push in Washington for equality in law.

When it comes to enforcing civil rights laws, the Obama administration is making it clear that there’s a new sheriff in town. For many years, the traditional civil rights establishment has argued that many of the most important issues affecting women, Blacks and other people of color have been ignored by the Bush administration. Instead of pushing for voters’ rights, fair housing, employment and bank-lending practicing, the previous White House politicized the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, irking rights advocates, particularly Black and Hispanic leaders, critics say. Enter Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., President Obama’s choice as U.S. attorney general. Holder, the nation’s top prosecutor, is “planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly,” The New York Times reports. Under Bush, the department took less of a broad-brush approach, choosing instead to concentrate on individual cases where there was evidence of deliberate bias, according to the Times. To execute this more aggressive enforcement, the current administration has begun scores of more civil rights lawyers. This, Holder told the Times, will help the division get “back to doing what it has traditionally done. But it’s really only a start. I think the wounds that were inflicted on this division were deep, and it will take some time for them to fully heal.” But Holder isn’t without his share of critics. Some conservatives, still frustrated with charges that Bush’s appointees were less concerned about enforcing civil-rights laws than they were about maintaining a right-wing political agenda, are now blaming the Obama administration of playing political games. Holder rejects such claims. “Of course there are going to be critics,” Holder said. But “any objective observer” can see that he is sticking with “the historical mission of the division, not straying into some kind of liberal orthodoxy. It really is just a function of enforcing the statutes.”

Former President Bill Clinton, who was blasted by Black leaders for his campaign tactics during his wife’s run against Barack Obama, is back to the kind of talk that made him a star in the Black community. On Saturday, during Major League Baseball’s Beacon Awards Luncheon in Cincinnati, Clinton said that racial equality in America is still a long way off – despite the election of Obama as president. Read more.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., founded one of the nation’s most enduring civil rights organizations, was released from the hospital Monday after nearly fainting following his sermon at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. “I just got overheated,” Lowery told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home. “The doctor did tell me to slow down, though. I’m going to slow down, but it’s hard. Nobody respects my retirement, and I don’t insist. You have to be grateful folks still want you around.” Read the rest.

 The nation’s oldest civil rights organization kicked off its hundred-year anniversary Thursday outlining a list of priorities for the nation’s first African-American president. “At the end of the day we are not an organization who is here to celebrate any milestone too much,” said Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP. “On Jan. 20 we celebrated Obama as the first black president. On Jan. 21 we were aware that he was the 44th president of the U.S. And we are out there making sure that his agenda is our agenda.” And unlike in past years, when the NAACP found itself begging for an audience with the president or hoping to get him to be sensitive to minority concerns, there’s no pre-existing hostility. “That is the beauty of this moment, we aren’t relegated to the office of public liaison,” Jealous said. Among the issues that the NAACP wants to see addressed during the Obama administration are, the establishment of policing standards to ensure fair law-enforcement practices in all communities; an immediate moratorium on home foreclosures; strict enforcement of human rights and civil rights laws; and the adoption of policies that provide health care to uninsured persons.

More than a half-century after the Supreme Court banned racial segregation, Black and Latino students increasingly are attending schools with very few Whites, a new report shows. In 1954, the high court agreed that racial segregation meant African Americans were relegated to inferior schools. Today, many of the schools occupied by students of color are still more likely to be dilapidated and unsafe, and less likely to have adequate resources or qualified teachers, according to the report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California. “It would be a tragedy if the country assumed from the Obama election that the problems of race have been solved, when many inequalities are actually deepening,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project. The segregation trends are “the result of a systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms for decades,” Orfield said. Contributing to the racial division is the fact that the number of White students is shrinking, meaning they are often sprinkled among a flood of nonwhite students. Orfield also points to residential segregation. When authorities fail to act as integration watchdogs, segregation goes unabated, he said, noting that little has been done in recent years to enforce the Fair Housing Act, banning deliberate racial isolation in the housing market. Another alarming reality, the report says, is that 60 percent of Black and Latino students attend schools where the majority of the population is below the poverty level.

Bush says he was a good civil rights president. President Bush says America shouldn’t forget about his contributions to civil rights. While acknowledging that Sen. Barack Obama’s election portends a “very hopeful moment for race relations,” the president pointed to such programs as No Child Left Behind education law, which he called “a piece of civil rights legislation” and his push to overhaul Social Security, saying it was aimed at giving Blacks a greater stake in the nation’s future. Read what else he had to say here.

Some Black lawmakers are unhappy with Obama’s cabinet picks. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have not publicly expressed it but The Hill.com is reporting that some Black lawmakers are disappointed with President-elect Obama’s picks for his cabinet and the way he went about it. “People I’ve talked to have expressed that they were hoping to have seen a few more African-Americans in place, and in places where you can pinpoint needs,” Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill) said. He pointed to a notable absence of Black nominations to positions that specifically deal with policy on urban problems like education, housing, labor and improvement of cities. Another aide, speaking anonymously, said CBC members are not questioning the qualifications of Obama’s nominees but they expected two things: “a better consultation and communication process and, at the end of the day, more blacks in the Cabinet,” reports the Hill.com. Only one member of the CBC, Chairwoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), has released a statement commending Obama on his nominations. She praised the President-elect for picking Steven Chu, an Asian American, to head the Energy Department. So far, Obama has selected four African Americans to his cabinet.

Civil rights icon will deliver the inauguration benediction. The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, who helped found one of the nation’s largest and oldest civil right groups and marched aside the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to headline during inauguration ceremonies next month. Lowery, a stalwart of the Civil Rights Movement and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, will deliver the benediction. He said Obama called to ask him to take part in the Jan. 20 ceremony but hadn’t decided exactly what role he would play. Obama said he’d get back to Lowery. “I guess this is his way of getting back to me,” Lowery said Wednesday afternoon. “I’m grateful to the president-elect for picking a small-town preacher like me to be on the program of such a historic inauguration. I’m humbled.” U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said through a spokeswoman, “I am very pleased that a minister like Rev. Joseph Lowery will play a powerful role in this inauguration.”