LOS ANGELES (AP) — Actor Michael Jace, who played a police officer on the hit TV show “The Shield,” was arrested on suspicion of homicide after his wife was found shot to death in their Los Angeles home, authorities said.
Police arrived at the couple’s home in the Hyde Park neighborhood around 8:30 p.m. Monday after a report of shots fired, Officer Chris No said. April Jace, 40, was found dead inside, officials said.
Michael Jace was taken into custody and booked early Tuesday on suspicion of homicide, No said. He was being held in a Los Angeles jail in lieu of $1 million bail. Calls from The Associated Press seeking comment from Jace’s agent and manager were not immediately returned Tuesday.
Coroner’s officials were on the scene Tuesday morning in the quiet residential neighborhood.
Jace, 51, is best known for his role as LAPD Officer Julien Lowe in the TV series “The Shield.” He also appeared on the show “Southland” and had small roles in the movies “Planet of the Apes,” ”Boogie Nights” and “Forrest Gump.”
Jace and his wife were married for nine years and have two young sons. Lt. John Jenal said two children were at the single-family home at the time of the shooting. They were in protective custody this morning, he told City News Service.
Michael Jace was previously married to Jennifer Bitterman, but they divorced in 2002.
Records show Jace filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2011, listing debts between $500,000 and $1 million. Much of the debt appeared to be related to his home, which he owed more on than it was worth, and more than $22,000 he owed in state and federal income taxes. More than $20,000 of his tax delinquency was owed to the state of California for the year 2008.
His wife was identified as a public school teacher for the past 10 years, according to the filings.
In a statement of his assets, Jace checked off a box indicating he didn’t own any firearms.
Jace had agreed to a payment plan in the bankruptcy, but by November 2013 had fallen behind by nearly $2,000. A trustee sought to dismiss the case over the late payments, but that petition was withdrawn on Dec. 24, 2013, records show.
There are no records of any criminal cases involving Jace in Los Angeles.

DURHAM, NC – The North Carolina NAACP on Monday embarked upon the next phase in its campaign to block the state’s monster voter suppression law from disenfranchising voters during the November general elections.
Monday night, the NC NAACP legal team – led by NCCU Law Professor Irv Joyner and Atty. Adam Stein as well as attorneys from Kirkland Ellis, LLP and Advancement Project – filed a motion in federal court seeking a preliminary injunction against HB 589 on the grounds that the new voter restrictions violate the 14th, 15th and 26th Amendments as well as Section II of the Voting Rights Act by disproportionately impacting people of color and other minority groups.
“Without same-day registration, without the full schedule of early voting, without voter protection from vigilante poll watchers, without the ability to cast provisional ballots if you mistakenly go to the wrong precinct, people in North Carolina will be disenfranchised during November’s critical elections,” said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement. “Disproportionately, those disenfranchised will be people of color, seniors, women, youth, the disabled and other minorities. We cannot forget that, for decades, our state legislature worked hard to keep people of color from the ballot box by passing all sorts of burdensome regulations that restricted their access to the ballot box. We did not stand idly by last summer when extremists passed the worst voter suppression law seen in the South since Jim Crow, and we will continue to take our fight for the simple, unfettered right to vote into the courts and into the streets this summer.”
“While the voters of North Carolina were fighting to have their voices heard at the statehouse during yesterday’s Moral Monday demonstration, our attorneys were at the courthouse filing this motion seeking a preliminary injunction to block HB 589 for the November 2014 election,” said Penda D. Hair, Co-Director of Advancement Project. “While our lawsuit is pending, North Carolina should maintain the same voting procedures that were in place for the 2010 and 2012 elections – successful procedures that led to North Carolina having among the highest rates of voter turnout in the nation. In our brief, we provide unequivocal evidence showing that North Carolina’s voter suppression law has a disparate impact on voters of color, and will abridge the right to vote for voters across the state. A preliminary injunction is necessary ensure that the voters of North Carolina are not harmed by the effects of HB589 while our case challenging this harmful law makes its way through the courts.”
The NC NAACP legal team filed its motion and its 95-page brief jointly with the League of Women Voters plaintiffs and with interveners representing youth voters in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. In the brief, the NC NAACP argues that these voter restrictions should not be allowed during the 2014 general elections because clear evidence shows that they will hurt African Americans and young people.
“Defendants do not (because they cannot) dispute that HB 589 imposes disproportionate burdens on African Americans,” the brief reads. “Indeed, at the time it enacted HB 589, the General Assembly had before it (or previously had been told) that African Americans used early voting, SDR, and out-of-precinct voting at far higher rates than whites. The evidence shows, moreover, that the elimination of these practices will interact with existing socioeconomic conditions to impose material burdens on African Americans’ ability to vote. North Carolina has an unfortunate and judicially recognized history of racial discrimination, and the effects of that discrimination persist to this day.”
The NC NAACP legal team expects to argue its case for a preliminary injunction in federal court this summer. A date for the hearing has not yet been scheduled.

 WASHINGTON – Sixty years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” had no place in America’s education system. In his opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that education provided by the state was “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms” and that to separate Black children “from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority…in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” In commemoration of this landmark decision, Advancement Project issued the following statement.
“The Brown v. Board of Education decision was a hallmark event for our democracy, and a defining moment in the struggle for equality and justice,” said Advancement Project Co-Director Penda D. Hair. “Yet America has not lived up to the equal educational opportunity that it promised. Today children of color are more likely to be in schools that are labeled as failing, shut down and turned over to private purveyors, instead of getting the resources they need to be successful. This new playbook is producing the same outcomes for children of color: schools that are still separate, and still unequal.”
“However, communities of color on the ground are fighting tirelessly (to) realize equal education for their children,” said Advancement Project Co-Director Judith Browne Dianis. “This week we joined the Journey for Justice Alliance, a coalition of community-based organizations in 22 cities, to file three complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to confront this mounting crisis. We zeroed in on the departments of education in Newark, New Jersey; Chicago and New Orleans – cities where school districts are shirking their responsibility to educate African-American children, and instead are giving multi-million dollar contracts to companies to do the job. In each city Black students are being uprooted, shuffled around to low-quality schools, with their hopes of equal educational opportunities dashed. We hope the Department of Justice will investigate and end these practices to bring our nation closer to the still elusive promise of Brown v. Board of Education.”
“In more ways than one, today’s education system is an affront to the Brown v. Board of Education decision made 60 years ago,” said Thena Robinson-Mock, Program Director for Advancement Project’s Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track Campaign. “The new system of ‘separate and unequal’ runs deep across the country. National patterns show that traditional  public schools serving predominantly children of color are being set up to fail, through high-stakes testing and other policies that promote prison-like environments – geared at keeping students under control, undereducated and under-supported. On this anniversary, we are proud to stand beside parents, students and educators who have been doing the work, for decades, of building opportunity and access to excellent neighborhood schools for all children.”

(Photo: AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — As a Head Start and Yale Law School graduate, Cornell William Brooks calls himself a direct beneficiary of Brown v. Board Education.
Now the lawyer and activist is taking over as the next national president and CEO of the NAACP, whose legal arm brought that landmark legal case challenging segregation in public schools.
On the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision that said separating Black and white children was unconstitutional, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization announced Brooks’ selection.
The NAACP’s board made the final decision Friday night, and chair Roslyn Brock told The Associated Press about Brooks’ new position on Saturday morning.
Brooks will be formally presented to the Baltimore-based organization’s members at its national convention in Las Vegas in July.
“I am a beneficiary, an heir and a grandson, if you will, of Brown versus Board of Education,” Brooks told the AP.
“My life is the direct product, if you will, of the legacy of the blood, sweat and tears of the NAACP and so today I’m particularly mindful that the NAACP has made America what it is, and certainly made my life possible and we are all grateful heirs of that legacy.”
Brooks, 53, of Annandale, New Jersey, will become the NAACP’s 18th national president, replacing interim leader Lorraine Miller. Miller has served in that position since Benjamin Jealous ended his five-year tenure last year.
“I am deeply humbled and honored to be entrusted with the opportunity to lead this powerful historic organization,” Brooks said in an interview. “In our fight to ensure voting rights, economic equality, health equity, and ending racial discrimination for all people, there is indeed much work to be done.”
Brooks, a minister, is originally from Georgetown, South Carolina. He currently is president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, a Newark, New Jersey-based urban research and advocacy organization.
He graduated from Jackson State University, received a Master of Divinity from Boston University School of Theology and got his law degree from Yale.
Brooks has worked as a lawyer for the Federal Communication Commission and the Justice Department. He also ran for Congress as a Democrat in Virginia in 1998. He still owns a home in Woodbridge, Virginia.
“Mr. Brooks is a pioneering lawyer and civil rights leader who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the association,” Brock said. “We look forward to leveraging his legal prowess, vision and leadership as we tackle the pressing civil rights issues of the 21st century.”
The organization had hired The Hollins Group Inc., of Chicago to lead its search for a new CEO, and Brooks was selected from more than 450 applications, Brock said. The organization held more than 30 interviews, she said.
Brooks said he would start talking to and listening to the NAACP’s membership to plan for the organization’s future.
He said he would present his vision for the NAACP at the organization’s convention after he’s held conversations with the members.
“As long as America continues to be a great, but imperfect nation, there will be a need for the NAACP,” Brooks said.
Jealous called Brooks’ selection “the beginning of a new and exciting chapter for the NAACP.”
(Photo: AP)

Jim Crow banished, but failing public schools a crisis for many Black youth

 WASHINGTON, D.C. — On the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that mandated desegregation in American public schools, members of the Project 21 Black leadership network commend the necessary desegregation of public education, but point out that providing all students with a quality education, including viable alternatives, still challenges government.
“While it’s important to commemorate Brown v. Board of Education as the beginning of the end of legal segregation, it must also be recognized that public education still sometimes denies true opportunity when government cannot live up to its mission. There’s still a long way to go, particularly in giving minority children in large cities an escape from low-performing, government-run schools,” said Project 21 Co-Chairman Cherylyn Harley LeBon, a former senior counsel with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.  “Instituting voucher programs and encouraging charter schools is a positive step toward giving parents alternatives to failing public schools. While there are leaders such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and former Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty willing to champion such reforms, it’s a shame many of the same people lauding the Brown anniversary are also among those seeking to stop such reforms from proceeding.”
A consolidation of five different cases involving racially-segregated public schools, the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down by the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954. The ruling, a unanimous decision, declared that segregated schools are “inherently unequal” and that there is no place for the Jim Crow era doctrine of “separate but equal” in government-run school systems. The Court at the time of the ruling left it up to state attorneys general to submit individual desegregation plans, but declared in 1955 that efforts to fully desegregate public schools needed to commence with “all deliberate speed.”
In its ruling on Brown, the Supreme Court found the policy of segregated education violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In doing so, the Court overturned its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that had upheld Jim Crow laws.
“Brown v. Board of Education should be celebrated as a high point in American history. What should be lamented is the current state of the nation’s public school system, said Project 21’s Derryck Green, a doctoral candidate in ministry. “De facto segregation has returned on the basis of class, which unfortunately, continues to disproportionately affect poor minorities — particularly Black children.
Teachers’ unions have demonstrated an unwillingness to allow poor and minority children access to quality education of their parents’ choosing through school vouchers.
Teachers’ unions obstructing school choice is perfectly emblematic of segregationist former Alabama governor George Wallace, who defiantly stood in the schoolhouse door to block welcome progress.”
“As we mark the 60th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, there is little to celebrate in the way of educational achievement in inner city schools across America. Dropout rates are too high and graduation rates too low. An appropriate and effective way to address the poor performance is through parental engagement and raising expectations,” said Project 21’s Stacy Washington, a St. Louis radio talk show host and former school board officer. “Many innovative educational formats have sprung up in response to academic malaise and are gaining in popularity as parents leave public education institutions and seek other options. The best way to celebrate and commemorate Brown is by supporting those parents and communities and encouraging more educational innovation.”
Over (the) past two years, Project 21 has been involved in the U.S. Supreme Court education cases of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.
Project 21 also held a policy luncheon after the Court heard arguments in the Schuette that featured Jennifer Gratz, the executive director of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative that was the basis for the Schuette case. Gratz, of course, also was the plaintiff in the 2003 race preference case of Gratz v. Bollinger.
In 2014, members of Project 21 have already participated in over 600 media interviews and citations that include MSNBC, the Fox News Channel, TVOne, Sirius/XM satellite radio, The Root and Westwood One on a myriad of issues facing Black Americans that includes education, racial preferences, the economy, voter ID, regulation and law enforcement.
Project 21, a leading voice of Black conservatives for nearly two decades, is sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research (http://www.nationalcenter.org). Contributions to the National Center are tax deductible and greatly-appreciated.