White Baton Rouge residents win court battle to form St. George, splitting from poorer Black neighborhoods.
Detractors of the new city label the initiative as “racist,” fearing it will result in the formation of a “white enclave.”
Louisiana Supreme Court allows incorporation.… pic.twitter.com/4ruScJq2zo
— AF Post (@AFpost) April 29, 2024
The plan was to force-integrate whites. They’ve been doing this since the 1960s. Supposedly, that was going to bring the blacks out of poverty.
It didn’t work.
People need to be allowed to segregate.
A group of wealthy white Baton Rouge residents have won a decades-long battle to split from the majority-black city to form their own suburb following a state Supreme Court ruling.
After reversing a lower court’s decision on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in favor of the incorporation of St. George, which will form in southeast Baton Rouge.
“This is the culmination of citizens exercising their constitutional rights. We voted and we won,” Andrew Murrell, one of the leaders of the St. George campaign, said in a statement following the victory.
Andrew Murrell
“Now we begin the process of delivering on our promises of a better city,” he added. “We welcome both our friends and foes to the table to create St. George.”
Much like the case with Central — the last incorporated city to be born in East Baton Rouge Parish — the St. George initiative began with hopes of residents starting a new school district before ultimately deciding to create their own city.
Although the St. George supporters failed to garner enough votes in 2015, four years later, the initiative won the election before it was stalled by a lengthy court battle, the New York Times reported.
Sharon Weston Broome, the mayor-president leading the combined Baton Rouge and East Baton Rouge Parish governments, had sued the St. George organizers arguing that the split would siphon more than $48 million in annual tax revenue from the local government.
Sharon Weston Broome
The opposition also argued that St. George would not have the proper budget to operate on its own.
Justice William J. Crain, the author of the majority opinion, disagreed with the city’s assessment and claimed that a thriving St. George could even become an asset to the declining Baton Rouge.
I’m sure all of these whites would tell you over and over again that they are “not racist.” But they don’t want to live around blacks, they don’t want to go to school with blacks, they don’t want to pay for blacks.
It would be so much easier if they could just say that, instead of dancing around the issue.
It is totally unclear to me why being “racist” has become such a big problem for white people. It wasn’t in the 1960s.
Apparently, whites are a lot softer than they were back then.
Feminism has a lot to do with that.
It’s also social isolation. No one wants to be destroyed for saying something “racist,” and people won’t stand together as communities. So anyone who says the racist thing is going to be destroyed.
You’d have thought that after the BLM riots, people would be willing to just say “we don’t want to be around blacks because they are dangerous and destructive.”
It’s nice to see a community standing together. They didn’t ever say “we don’t want these blacks” – which would have been ideal – but they didn’t back down when they were called racists. That’s coming a lot closer to where we need to be.
See Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome’s statement about the Louisiana Supreme Court ruling to incorporate the city of St. George: ‘My goal from the very beginning is to advocate for a united Baton Rouge’https://t.co/KZ8grTOYBT pic.twitter.com/0BhIBOtVVL
— WBRZ News (@WBRZ) April 26, 2024