Richard Fausset

ATLANTA -- Seven college-age Latinos gathered in downtown Atlanta and passed around a microphone, announcing to the world that they were coming out of the shadows as illegal immigrants.

Then, in an act of civil disobedience, they sat down in the middle of a busy street and announced it again to a large and chanting crowd. When they were hauled off to jail, they even declared their status to a pair Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers -- who proceeded to do nothing.

After a night in jail, the seven were free again on April 6, clutching misdemeanor tickets issued by the city for blocking traffic.

So what, one might ask, does it take for an illegal immigrant to get deported in the United States of 2011?

That turns out to be a good question, particularly for immigrants who, like the Georgia youths, call themselves "the Dreamers" -- that is, immigrants who might have achieved legal status through the federal DREAM Act.

The legislation would have offered a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States at a young age, had lived here for at least five years, and enrolled in college or served in the military.

On the day of his swearing-in, Alabama Republican Gov. Robert J. Bentley raised concern among the state's non-Christians by declaring that people who had not accepted Jesus Christ were not his brothers and sisters.

Speaking to a large crowd Monday at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church -- where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached -- Bentley said that "if you're a Christian and you're saved ... it makes you and me brother and sister," according to a report in the Birmingham News.

"Now I will have to say that, if we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters," he added, according to the paper. "So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother."

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Confronted with depressing revenue numbers, this Southern city's school board reluctantly embraced a solution that is increasingly common in America's struggling economy: They voted to close schools, 10 of them.

The decision last month sparked a racially charged uproar. The district is 33 percent white. The majority of the school board is white. In the schools targeted for closure, 95 percent of students are minorities.

Before the vote, hundreds of residents, including many worried black and Latino parents, packed public forums to protest.

Charges of racism were leveled, and the local head of the NAACP was hauled away from one meeting in handcuffs. School board members have received threatening letters.

Yet, strangely, this season of tumult has also been a season of triumph for a district where the leadership professes to put a premium on educating its poor and minority students.