Barry will be down in Cincinnati tonight speaking to the NAACP, which is having its annual convention down there this year.(You'll remember that W dissed them in the run-up to the 2000 election after they ran an ad in Texas basically blaming him for the horrific dragging death of James Byrd, but that's another story.)
Anyway, he's giving his speech at the Duke Energy Convention Center.
That name of the venue chosen by the NAACP jumped out at me and, as best I can figure, Duke Energy is somehow related to what used to be known as Duke Power.
"Who cares, Dan?" you ask...
Well, that company was part of the landmark Civil Rights case, Griggs v Duke Power.
Argued in 1970, the Supreme Court ruled against Duke's hiring and placement strategies as it came to race. They ruled that if you are going to use educational achievement or aptitude tests, said measures must be reasonably-related to job performance. Until then, regardless of the intent of the practice, it had been resulting in disparate impact against African-Americans.
This leads to a much longer discussion I might post on here someday (I spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about things like this in a past life up in the frozen tundra), but I wonder if anyone else will make note of this little connection.
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