July 3, 1991

In a signal that it intends to enforce the Voting Rights Act with new vigor, the Justice Department has blocked legislative redistricting plans devised by Mississippi and Louisiana on the ground that they discriminate against blacks. Assistant Attorney General John R. Dunne today expressed sweeping objections to the redistricting plans for the Mississippi State Senate and House of Representatives. On Friday, he objected to a plan for the Louisiana Senate.

H. Carl McCall was elected president of the New York City Board of Eduation yesterday in an atmosphere of disharmony and some bitterness that may cloud his efforts to shape the board into an effective policy-making body. The public show of resentment in a ceremony that usually has the ordered dignity of a coronation came as something of a surprise.

The old St. Benedict the Moor School on East Gordon Street here, which Clarence Thomas attended for eight years in the 1950's and 60's, has long been closed, a footnote to the history of segregated Savannah. Its windows are boarded up, its swings broken, its plywood doors padlocked; the Irish nuns who taught there, whom some white townspeople called the "nigger sisters," have all retired to convents elsewhere. But their influence, and St. Benedict's, lives on in Judge Thomas, as he acknowledged Monday when President Bush nominated him to the United States Supreme Court. Their teachings are present in the defiant conviction they instilled in Clarence Thomas that with enough hard work and determination he could overcome quadruple handicaps: being black, fatherless, poor and Catholic in the Eisenhower-era South.

Apple Computer Inc. and the International Business Machines Corporation are expected to announce Wednesday the formation of an alliance that would combine the strengths of two of the most powerful companies in the computer industry. The agreement, which has been the subject of industry speculation for several weeks, is expected to be even broader than what has already been reported. In addition to a technology exchange, the pact is expected to pave the way for the two companies to sell some of each other's products, according to one industry executive who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

When it came to stock mutual fund performance in the second quarter of this year, it turned out that what glittered really was gold. Gold-oriented mutual funds greatly outpaced the stock market from April to June, making them one of the few bright spots among mutual funds investing primarily in common stocks. Stock funds, in general, fell a bit more than the stock market did.