New Jersey's Lawrenceville School honors legacy of its first Black students: "We changed that school forever"
CBSN
An atrium at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey renamed after the school's first two Black students is seeing its first school year, which started this week. Students will walk through the Battle-Fitzgerald entrance and atrium, which honors Lyals Battle and Darrell Fitzgerald and celebrates the boarding school's progress in racial diversity.
In the atrium, they'll have the chance to view memorabilia from the alumni behind glass cases and read a plaque on the wall that recounts the history of desegregation on campus after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
But while boarding schools like Lawrenceville across the United States are now some of the country's most diverse educational institutions, many of these schools were reluctant to open their doors to students of color decades ago.
More than 2 million federal employees face a looming deadline: By midnight on Thursday, they must decide whether to accept a "deferred resignation" offer from the Trump administration. If workers accept, according to a White House plan, they would continue getting paid through September but would be excused from reporting for duty. But if they opt to keep their jobs, they could get fired.
More employees of the Environmental Protection Agency were informed Wednesday that their jobs appear in doubt. Senior leadership at the EPA held an all-staff meeting to tell individuals that President Trump's executive order, "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing," which was responsible for the closure of the agency's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office, will likely lead to the shuttering of the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights as well.
In her first hours as attorney general, Pam Bondi issued a broad slate of directives that included a Justice Department review of the prosecutions of President Trump, a reorientation of department work to focus on harsher punishments, actions punishing so-called "sanctuary" cities and an end to diversity initiatives at the department.