On October 17th, ThinkProgress published the article "KKK Battles With Town Over Renaming School Named For Klan Founder". In this article, author Annie-Rose Strasser intends to make the residents of Jacksonville, Florida aware that maintaining a high school named after a KKK Grand Wizard sends a strong message to the rest of the country. After the integration law Brown v Board of Education passed, in 1959 school administrators renamed the school to Nathan B. Forrest, a KKK Grand Wizard, to show that they were displeased with the ruling. It was a Jacksonville resident, who started a petition on Change.org to ask the Duval County School Board to change the name. Only about four years ago, the same request failed with a 5 to 2 vote against it, but with the help of change.org 150,000 signatures have been gathered which caught the attention of the board. Even with growing support, the petition's author is facing a group of opponents, the KKK. They argue that Forrest is a honorable man and that the Klan is "protecting defenseless southerners from criminal activities perpetrated by Yankee carpet baggers, scalawags, and many bestial blacks...". The school's superintendent Dr. Nikolai Vitti responds by saying that the name sends a wrong message to the African-American community and plans on opening up a town hall community discussion to further talk about the issue sometime this month.
I agree that keeping the name of the high school sends a bad message to every African-American community across the United States. It's disrespectful looking at how much racism and discrimination they had to face. It's not fair towards students that will constantly be reminded of what crimes the Klan has committed against their ancestors. If the name change won't occur, people will recognize Jacksonville as a city that's still narrow-minded to this day and being the largest, reflecting the rest of Florida. I feel like this issue might have an effect on how Florida will be perceived in the future.

Fair or Unfair ?

On October 4th, 2013, The New York Times published the article "A Second Chance in California" under the editorial section. In this article, the Editorial Board informs us that California passed a bill which prevents employers from performing background checks before applicants have met the minimum job requirement. This bill is intended to remove unfair obstructions that might keep applicants with a criminal record out of the job market.
The Editorial Board department is made up of 17 journalists and is considered separate from the newsroom. The primary audience are people with criminal records that have trouble getting the job they seek. Second, I believe the author is also targeting employers which don't always take consequences into account.
It might be true that 65 million Americans have criminal records, but I don't agree that it shuts them out of work. Most job applications only require you to state felonies you have been convicted of, not minor misdemeanors. So this wouldn't nearly affect as many people as stated in this article. I do think it's biased to perform background checks before the interview process, because the primary purpose would be to weed out candidates rather than finding out if the applicant is harmful to the agency. I feel the board is exaggerating when they state that many released prisoners tend to fall back. They don't provide statistics that prove that the majority of ex-criminals relapse or if any of them were attending rehabilitation programs. It's also not mentioned that there's a possibility that some of these applicants might be more hazardous in the workplace than to society. So in conclusion, I agree that it's acceptable to perform background checks if the conviction is applicable in a specific scenario. Otherwise it would be unfair to applicants that decided to turn their lives around and aren't given a second chance.