Brothers Sulaiman Lee, Leone’s Darealest and Noel Kerr (l-r) aim to boost the self-esteem of black children through books. (photo via voice-online.co.uk)
article by Rianna Raymond-Williams via voice-online.co.uk
Three brothers from Tottenham, North London, are on a mission to raise the self-esteem of African Caribbean children through books.
Sulaiman Lee, Noel Kerr and Leonegus Darealest are the trio behind Black Child Promotions, which aims to give children a positive view of their identity through the works of a range of authors.
The men hope to give young people access to knowledge about prominent black figures such Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King, Jr., successful black empires and movements, African Caribbean fables and folk stories as well as the writings of influential black political leaders.
One of the trio, Lee, told The Voice: “We have titles from the likes of Maya Angelou to Iyanla Vanzant to Amos N. Wilson and Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan. We have something for everyone, children’s stories, political books, poetry, autobiographies and more.”
He added: “For us, Black History isn’t just for one month, it’s all year round and that’s exactly what we want to show people. We believe we need to promote black history more, as it isn’t something we see widely in the media or something that our children are learning about at school.”
The trio has recently set up a stall outside Brixton tube station and another one outside Stratford tube station in a bid to reach as many people as they can and engage them about the importance of reading.
However their main location for the last 12 years has been in Seven Sisters, north London.
Before becoming involved with books, the three men sold educational DVDs outside Seven Sisters tube station. Among the titles they sold were the acclaimed documentary series Hidden Colors by Tariq Nasheed and films about influential figures such as Malcolm X.
Akai Gurley’s family, including his mother, Sylvia Palmer, center, after Officer Peter Liang was found guilty of manslaughter in February. (BRYAN R. SMITH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
New York City has agreed to pay more than $4 million to the family of Akai Gurley, the unarmed man killed in a Brooklyn housing project in 2014 by a police officer on patrol, according to a lawyer for Mr. Gurley’s family.
The city will pay the bulk of the settlement, $4.1 million, said Scott Rynecki, who represents Mr. Gurley’s domestic partner, Kimberly Ballinger, and their 4-year-old daughter, Akaila Gurley. The New York City Housing Authority will pay an additional $400,000, and the officer, Peter Liang, will pay $25,000, Mr. Rynecki said.
The settlement, reported by The Daily News, was finalized on Monday afternoon by Justice Dawn M. Jimenez-Salta of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, after two months of negotiations. Efforts to reach a lawyer for Mr. Liang and the city’s Law Department late Monday were unsuccessful.
Mr. Gurley was killed on Nov. 20, 2014, by a ricocheting bullet fired by Mr. Liang, who was on a night patrol in a dark stairwell in the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood.
Kim Drew has been photographed in all shades of lipstick.Chalk-white, indigo — like she’s just had a Slurpee. When she walked into the Black Art Incubator on a recent Thursday, it was with red lips and a navy dress fit for a tennis court. At her chest hung a white pipe fragment, bought in Miami. “I wish I could remember the artist who made it,” she fretted when I admired the necklace.
She looked punk and prep, red-white-and-blue speared with a pipe. It’s a tension that shapes Drew’s work. She runs social media for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she’s credited with starting a slow-burn revolution via Tumblr, arguably the lowest-fi gallery there is. Her high-traffic account Black Contemporary Art — a simple visual catalog of work by black artists — operates on the premise that black artists have been left out of art history. She slots them in without bitterness. “It’s either that people are recorded, or they’re not,” she tells me matter-of-factly.
That same current of low-key, savvy correction undergirds the Black Art Incubator, Drew’s new project, birthed with three other black women also in their twenties. Billed as a “social sculpture,” the incubator takes blackness — and all that racial identifier suggests about what a person might know or feel — as a given. To see the space as a critique, Drew says, is reductive. The project isn’t so much oppositional as an inversion of what we tend to expect. “Most art institutions are rooted in whiteness, but it’s implied, it’s this normalized thing,” she says. With the project, “we’re normalizing being rooted in blackness without beating people over the head with it.”
Drew and her co-founders — Jessica Bell Brown, an art historian, and Jessica Lynne and Taylor Renee Aldridge, both art writers — took a year to build the space and its offerings. “We still have a running group text,” Drew notes wryly. “It’s very internet. Very 2016.”
In practice, it wends a little 1960s. The incubator lives through August 19 at Recess, a residency space on the Lower East Side. The feel is of a secret clubhouse, convivial with an insider edge. You get the sense that while anyone is welcome, Berkeley coffeehouse–style, there’s more fun to be had if you’re part of the group. At quieter times, those anxieties recede; the space charms. A bench hugs the front window. Plants flare against white walls. Ginger cookies, mint tea, and a soulful Spotify playlist are all on tap.
Black Art Incubator
Recess
41 Grand Street
646-863-3765, recessart.org
Through August 19
During structured hours, there are sessions: Talks fall into two genres (“art and money” or “archive”), while “office hours” and “open crits” mimic MFA programming — but with the expectation that “you know who Richard Wright is,” as the legendary East Village artist Sur Rodney (Sur), who recently gave a talk, puts it to me via phone. The incubator interests him for how it overturns expectations of knowledge, eschewing the usual canon in favor of one not often taught in schools. “There’s a certain standard, a bibliography of material that we’ve all had to study,” he says, citing Moby Dick and Charles Dickens. On top of playing that game, people of color “have to do all this other research to understand where they fit in.” Joshua Moton, a cellist who performed at an open crit last month, has experienced this firsthand. He explains the bodily discomfort his training in the European classical tradition gave him. In college, he found jazz. “Coltrane, Ayler, Silva, Davis,” he says. “I was able to heal,” to find “parts of the cello that I never really thought were there.” While crits are known as stress-bombs in academia, Moton says his — led by Adrienne Edwards, the dynamic curator-at-large of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, clad in metallic pants — felt like a “safe space.”
Therapeutic spaces face similar accusations as art schools over what their members tend to assume about their peers, whether to do with money, access, or personal history, and the incubator also addresses those issues. Moton, for one, returned the next day for a meditation hour. Here, too, he felt a difference. He drew a contrast for me, mentioning a yoga class he recently attended in which an Australian woman near him went on about “wage slaves,” throwing off his balance. “What does it mean to have a black space?” he asked. “When you can be a black person and breathe and not feel off.” To read full article, go to: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/black-art-incubator-aims-to-invert-art-world-normal-8960371
Tyran Bell (photo via abc13.com) article by Breanna Edwards via theroot.com
Earlier this month, 10-year-old Tyran Bell, a boy from North Carolina, used his mother’s Facebook page to seek jobs mowing lawns because his mother could not afford to buy his school supplies for the school year.
According to an earlier news report by WECT, Tyran’s mom had missed a lot of work recently because his uncle was hospitalized. Tyran’s request was met with an overwhelming response from local businesses, community members, neighbors and friends. One local business, A1 Security Services LLC, started a donation drive for Tyran, WECT reports. “He’s 10 years old. And for a 10-year-old to take that initiative and want to help his mom because she was struggling, I just thought that was amazing,” A1 Security Services President Theresa Babb told the news station.
Tyran is now more than covered for his school supplies, but the precocious 10-year-old is passing on his fortune and giving back to the community that helped him out. “I’m gonna put them in bags and go around the community and pass them out to whoever needs school supplies,” he told the news station. Babb is also looking for ways to give away the extra donations from the drive, telling WECTthat her company is speaking with social workers to see which local schools need the supplies. Source: Donations Pour In for 10-Year-Old Boy Who Asked to Mow Lawns to Pay for School Supplies
Carlos Miller and Chris Bentley, founders of Live FRESH Palm Beach County. (photo via palmbeachpost.com) article by Angela Bronner Helm via theroot.com Chris Bentley and Carlos Miller, two African-American men who have been friends since middle school, have started an innovative way to help the homeless of Palm Beach County, Fla. The two started a nonprofit—Live FRESH (Feeling Revitalized Encourages Sustainable Happiness)—and have launched a mobile shower facility, an air conditioned trailer equipped with six private shower/changing area rooms, to assist the area’s transient population.
The Palm Beach Post reports that the two chose showers specifically: “For us, that’s where dignity and self-respect starts … with the ability to stay clean and be presentable,” says Bentley. “Cleanliness is a fundamental need. We actually see it as basic human right and because the homeless population can be hard to reach, we knew we would have to come to them and make ourselves available in areas they could easily reach.”
Miller writes on the website: “To see a human being, living in the United States of all countries, walk inside a store with apprehension over being shunned or offensive to the atmosphere due to their odor or disheveled state grabbed at the core of my heart.”About 250 people have participated since the program began March 31, reports the Post.
Each participant gets a packet with personal hygiene essentials including deodorant, towels, soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothbrush, toothpaste and dental floss. The organization was able to launch its fund with a $100,000 grant from Impact the Palm Beaches and smaller donations from other organizations. To read full article and see video, go to: Longtime Friends Start Mobile Shower Facility for the Homeless in Fla.
Adepeju Jaiyeoba (photo via blogpath.org) article by Hadassah Egbedi via venturesafrica.com Adepeju Jaiyeoba is the founder and CEO of Mother’s Delivery Kit (MDK), a Lagos-based social enterprise established to promote and enhance safe births, instigate behavioral change and economically empower women in Nigeria.
Her enterprise supplies birthing kits to health centres, hospitals, traditional birth attendants as well as maternal and child health organisations across the country. Prior to the establishment of MDK, the death of a friend from birthing complications in 2011, inspired Jaiyeoba to set up a non-governmental, non-profit organisation called the Brown Button Foundation.
“Her death put a face on every maternal and child death statistic I had heard,” Jaiyeoba said on the loss of her friend. “She was educated and brilliant, and she sought out health care services during her pregnancy. Yet she became one of the 13 women who die daily during childbirth in Nigeria. The health care system had failed her and her unborn baby.”
Maternal and child mortality has always been an issue in developing countries around the world. Many pregnant women are exposed to several risks and complications because they lack easy access to healthcare facilities, skilled doctors, or even an ambulance or vehicle to transport them when in labour. This is why each year, reducing infant and maternal mortality is a major part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in many countries. To read more, go to: This lifesaving delivery kit designed by a Nigerian woman was inspired by the death of a friend – Ventures Africa
CREDIT: Zsa Zsa Heard/ Facebook article by Shenequa Golding via vibe.com
Four Georgia teens are receiving a virtual standing ovation from the Internet after Zsa Zsa Heard praised their tenacity on Facebook. The LaGrange Housing Authority CEO uploaded a photo of the young men after they walked into her office and asked for a job to avoid gangs.
Heard spoke with Fox 32 and recounted the entire story. After they walked into her office asking for a job Heard asked why they wanted to work for her. “We do not want to be in a gang!” they said. She then inquired if they had been approached by a gang and the teens replied with a resounding yes.
Determined not to allow these young men to fall peril to gang life, Heard hired them on the spot. Since Wednesday (July 27) the young men have been keeping busy by passing out mail, working in the community garden and helping out in the kitchen. Source: Four Georgia Teens Ask For A Job To Avoid Gangs And Get Hired Immediately
(Screenshot via nbcnews.com) article by Zachary Roth via nbcnews.com
A federal appeals court on Friday struck down the heart of a North Carolina voting law seen as the strictest in the nation, finding that Republican lawmakers intentionally discriminated against African-Americans when they passed it.
A divided 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the measure’s provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The ruling is just the latest court win for voting rights advocates. A different federal appeals court ruled this month that Texas’s voter ID law is racially discriminatory and must be softened. And a district court softened Wisconsin’s ID law, too, though that decision is being appealed.
North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore said of the ruling, “we can only wonder if the intent is to reopen the door for voter fraud, potentially allowing fellow Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton and Roy Cooper to steal the election. We will obviously be appealing this politically motivated decision to the Supreme Court.”
The voting law imposed a voter ID requirement, cut early voting opportunities, eliminated same-day voter registration and banned out-of-precinct voting, among other provisions.
The court found that by 2013, African-American registration and turnout rates had reached near parity with those of whites. But weeks after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, Republicans said they planned to enact an “omnibus” voting law.
The court’s ruling continued: “Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African-Americans.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch praised the appeals court’s decision.
“I am pleased that the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has struck down a law that the court described in its ruling as ‘one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history,'” she said. “The ability of Americans to have a voice in the direction of their country — to have a fair and free opportunity to help write the story of this nation – is fundamental to who we are and who we aspire to be.” To read full article, go to:http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/appeals-court-strikes-down-strict-north-carolina-voting-law-n619836
Paramount Pictures has acquired an untitled pitch based on the life of Reverend Jeffrey Brown from Chadwick Boseman and Logan Coles that will be developed as a potential starring vehicle for the “Black Panther” star.
Boseman and Coles will co-write the script as well as produce the pic along with Ivan Reitman and Ali Bell of Montecito Pictures. Bell, who worked with Boseman on “Draft Day,” brought the pitch to Boseman and Coles who then brought it to Paramount. Tom Pollock will executive produce.
The pitch is about the Reverend Jeffrey Brown who fought to decrease gang violence in Boston.
Boseman and Coles recently worked together on the upcoming thriller “Message From the King,” which starred Boseman and was co-produced by Coles (Simon and Stephen Cornwell, David Lancaster and Benedict Carver were point producers). Besides this pitch, the duo has also recently sold an untitled pitch to Universal with Marc Platt Productions that the two are writing. To read full article, go to: http://variety.com/2016/film/news/chadwick-boseman-paramount-rev-jeffrey-brown-1201816741/
Co-founder of Melo7 Tech Partners Carmelo Anthony speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 at Brooklyn Cruise Terminal on May 11, 2016 in New York City. (Photo via eurweb.com) article via eurweb.com
NBA star Carmelo Anthony took to Instagram Friday with a lengthy post about the need for fellow professional athletes to drop all fear of backlash and use their platform to speak out against injustice.
“I’m calling for all my fellow ATHLETES to step up and take charge,” Anthony wrote. “There’s NO more sitting back and being afraid of tackling and addressing political issues anymore. Those days are long gone.”
The post was written in reaction to the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the killing of five police officers in Dallas Thursday night during protests over the two fatalities.
“I’m all about rallying, protesting, fighting for OUR people,” he wrote. “Look I’ll even lead the charge, By Any Means Necessary. We have to be smart about what we are doing though. We need to steer our anger in the right direction. Shooting 11 cops and killing 5 WILL NOT work.”
Melo’s caption accompanied a photo of Muhammad Ali with Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul Jabbar and other black athletes at the famed 1967 Cleveland summit in support of Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War.
Read Anthony’s entire statement below:
