Parents and school officials from Rea View Elementary in suburban Charlotte, NC are outraged as black students were forced to act like slaves during a field trip to a plantation.

From UPI.com

Teachers at Rea View Elementary in Waxhaw said they are planning to write leaders at the Latta Plantation about a lesson during a Wednesday field trip that involved an African-American tour guide instructing black students to pretend to be slaves while their white classmates looked on, WSOC-TV, Charlotte, reported Friday.

Parents said the three students chosen by tour guide Ian Campbell wore bags used to gather cotton while mimicking cotton picking.

“I am very enthusiastic about getting kids to think about how people did things in 1860, 1861 — even before that period,” said Campbell, who added he has been a historian for 15 years.

“I was trying to be historically correct not politically correct,” he said.

Kojo Nantambu, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg National Asssociation for the Advancement of Colored People, criticized the lesson.

“There is a lingering pain, a lingering bitterness, a lingering insecurity and a lingering sense of inhumanity since slavery. Because that’s still there, you want to be more sensitive than politically correct or historically correct,” he said.

Did the plantation go too far in their educational efforts? What do you think?

No Higher Premiums for Those with History of Med Problems? In a surprising but welcomed turn, the health insurance industry has taken the unprecedented step of offering similar premiums to people with pre-existing medical problems as those with no reported medical history. The offer, from America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, “is a potentially significant shift in the debate over reforming the nation’s health care system to rein in costs and cover an estimated 48 million uninsured people,” The Associated Press reports. The proposal was contained in a letter to key senators, according to AP, in which the insurance giants said their members would “phase out the practice of varying premiums based on health status in the individual market” if all Americans are required to get coverage. “The offer here is to transition away from risk rating, which is one of the things that makes life hell for real people,” said health economist Len Nichols of the New America Foundation public policy center. “They have never in their history offered to give up risk rating.”

Baby Products Recalled Two baby items are being recalled because they are potentially harmful to infants, MSNBC reports. Fisher-Price is recalling tens of thousands of 3-in-1 high chairs because the seat can fall backward from the frame if the release is unlatched while a child is inside, and several thousand Baby Necessities pacifiers are being pulled from shelves because they failed safety tests, MSNBC reports. The high chairs have seat backs that can detach if not snapped fully into place. In at least one instance, a detached seat back resulted in a fractured skull. The high chairs, which were manufactured in Mexico, were sold at Target stores around the country between December 2008 and March 2009. Nearly 3,000 of the pacifiers, manufactured in China and imported by OKK Trading of Los Angeles, Calif., pose a serious problem, as the nipples can separate from the base and present a choking hazard. No incidents have been reported. The pacifiers were sold at dollar and discount stores around the country between August 2007 and January 2009. For information about the high chairs, contact 800-432-5437 or http://www.service.mattel.com or http://www.cpsc.gov. Regarding the pacifiers, phone 877-655-8697 or http://www.okktrading.com or http://www.cpsc.gov.

His acceptance speech attracted more viewers than ever

It seems that everything that Barack Obama does these days makes history. Turns out that when Obama, the first Black major-party nominee, gave his acceptance speech last Thursday before the largest live convention audience ever – 84,000 people – there were more than 40 million people tuning in, making it the most popular TV event in political convention history. As Nielsen Media Research put it, “More people watched Obama speak from a packed stadium in Denver on Thursday than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing , the final ‘American Idol’ or the Academy Awards this year said Friday. (Four playoff football games, including the Super Bowl between the Giants and Patriots, were seen by more than 40 million people.)” Nielsen data showed that together CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, Univision, Telemundo, BET and TV One accounted for a 24.5 national household rating in the 10 p.m. hour. That translates into about 38.4 million people who watched Obama address the Democratic National Convention at Denver ’s Invesco Field. That doesn’t even include those who tuned in from C-SPAN or PBS, according to Nielsen. About 7.5 million of the viewers in the 10 p.m. hour were Blacks, Nielsen estimated. In Obama’s speech was the fifth-highest-rated, non-sports event watched by Blacks in more than a decade. Michael Jackson’s 2001 30th anniversary CBS special is No. 1. No other convention in history even comes close. The next largest TV audience was when 27.6 million watched Bush deliver his acceptance speech after defeating John Kerry four years ago.

History in the making at the Democratic National Convention

There is no way one can ignore the historic event today, as the Democratic National Convention prepares to nominate its first Black party nominee.  Do you think Obama will become the first Black president? More at Pamela On Politics.

The 58-year-old White worker was told that his actions were racially insensitive.
Keith John Sampson, a 58-year-old White janitor at an Indiana university, says he never dreamed that reading a history book on his lunch break about how students ran the KKK off campus 82 years ago would get him accused of racial harassment. But, after his co-worker at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis complained that he was reading the book, titled “Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan,” the controversy began to take on a life of its own. Before long, Sampson heard from his union, which told him in November that in essence he had brought pornography to work, and the affirmative action officer at the university told him that his “actions” constituted racial harassment. In a letter, Lillian Charleston wrote to him that he had “used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers.” But when the story hit the front pages of The Wall Street Journal, it was the university that began squirming. In February, three months after the brouhaha kicked off, the university informed Sampson that he would not face disciplinary. “My prior letter was not meant to imply that it is impermissible for you or to limit your ability to read scholarly books or other such literature during break times,” the now-retired Charleston wrote in a follow-up letter. “There is no university policy that prohibits reading such materials on break time.” Said Kevin Faulk, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, in a letter to the university, “I am sure you see the absurdity of a university threatening an employee with discipline for reading a scholarly work that deals with the efforts of Notre Dame students in the 1920s to fight the KKK.” It has taken a while, but on Friday, Charles Bantz, chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, wrote to Sampson, apologizing for stymieing his freedom of expression. “I can candidly say that we regret this situation took place,” Bantz wrote. So what does Sampson, a communications major at the university, have to say about the ordeal? “I have an interest in American history,” Sampson said. “I was trying to educate myself.”

North Carolina State basketball strategist’s relative sentenced

The son of North Carolina State basketball coach Sidney Lowe will do 15 months on a low-security prison farm after pleading guilty to numerous charges stemming from an ’07 armed robbery. Sidney Lowe II faced up to 11 years as his father asked the court for leniency. A judge suspended much of the sentence, also ordering five years of probation. Lowe pleaded to six counts each of robbery with a dangerous weapon and kidnapping, possession of a weapon on educational property, possession with intent to sell and deliver marijuana and possession of ecstasy.