Only a few weeks ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “The Lowell”, The Lowell High School student newspaper, published, inadvertently, an ad for a website promoting white supremacy.

The ad was funded by a group that seeks to “campaign to inform, awaken and radicalize our White American youth.”  The ad itself was seemingly nondescript – the text simply said “Free Music Downloads” – but the link leads to www.victoryforever.com, a site that very clearly promotes a Hate Group-like mentality.  The ad, which cost only $30, reportedly didn’t raise any eyebrows when it was first submitted, and that the web link looked drastically different from the time it was submitted to the time that it ran.  The newspaper’s faculty advisors never even looked into the Website, because they took the “deceptive and misleading” ad at face value.  Purportedly, the creators of the ad intentionally tried to deceive the newspaper faculty and students through the course of the transaction.  District spokesperson Gentle Blythe said that the remaining copies of the paper were pulled, and the mail-out subscriptions will not go out.

A separate anonymous e-mail to The Chronicle [that appears to originate at a computer at Idaho State University], stated, “San Francisco was selected because it has long suffered the ravages of liberal insanity, vile degeneracy and criminal vicitmization of it’s citzens by the very ‘diverse’ populations it seeks to embrace.”

The next week – just after the flare-up around the San Francisco incident was starting to subside – a second school paper was duped.  Parents of students at Carmel High School outside of Indianapolis were warned via mass voicemail about the compromise of their student paper, HiLite, by the same white power hate group, Victory Forever.  Using an e-mail address on the site, IndyStar reports that a response came from a person identifying as ‘Mike Shields’ and claims to be a spokesperson for the group, which is in the midst of a campaign to recruit “white youth all across America to fight for the survival of the white race,” chose that particular high school because it is one of the largest in the state and its paper is widely read and respected, and that combination gave the group “a great opportunity to spread [their] message”.

Parent Marc Allen says, “These neo-Nazis are pathetic excuses for human beings.  Their message is so poor they have to dupe young people into visiting their Web site.”  His daughter, Lauren, 18, said she doesn’t think the group would find many converts among her high school classmates, “I don’t think anyone really looks at the ads, to  be honest.  I don’t think anyone I know would go to the site and say ‘Cool, I’m going to look more into this.’”

Quotes like the one from the above student give promise to all of us working with Sojourn to the Past that discrimination and inequality are on their way to becoming a thing of the past, but incidents like these two, and the people who are behind dishonestly placing these messages in the reading material of impressionable students strengthen our resolve and remind us regularly of the importance of our mission.

We just spotted someone living out the Sojourn values! Not only does he believe in equality, but he fights for equal rights for students every day of his life. Read on to find out who he is.

There are many problems children face today as far as their education is concerned. Mark Dann, a pro bono attorney, is an individual standing up for these children’s rights. Dann is passionate about making sure that all students have equal opportunities in school, today.

When he was young, Dann’s parents faced financial difficulties during an economic downturn. They thought about moving to the South where the cost of living was much cheaper and jobs were more readily available. Instead they decided to live more frugally  in order for their son to continue recieing the kind of education they valued so much.

Today Dann tries cases that challenge educational disparities among schools – the kind of inequalities that kept his family on a tight budget when he was growing up in New York.