Forty years after Martin Luther King spoke of a day when men and women would be judged, not by color, but by their character, Dallas’s first black police chief, was fired. Some are saying Terrell Bolton lost his job because he was black, and fell out of favor with the city’s white power elite. Others say, it was Bolton’s incompetence, not his color, that brought him down.
Much has changed in the years. African Americans hold senior positions in government. They run Fortune 500 companies; in one case, an Ivy League university. So while they’ve moved from the corners of American society, some say black leaders are still judged by separate and unequal standards.
Guests:
Ellis Cose, Contributing Editor for Newsweek Magazine and author of “The Rage of a Privileged Class”
Edwin Dorn, Dean of the LBJ School of Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin
Jim Schutze, a columnist with the Dallas Observer.