With access to capital hard to come by for small black business owners, Patrice Banks is the proud recipient of a $50,000 prize from Keiretsu Forum Mid-Atlantic (K4-MA). The cornerstone of the Keiretsu Forum angel investment network recently announced the winners of its third annual Angel Capital Expo.
Girls Auto Clinic is a female-empowerment business, owned and operated by Banks, who is an engineer and technician. The big winner of the coveted $100,000 investment from K4-MA was Tassl, a college-centric social network application for smartphones.
Of the $50,000 investment, $25,000 is an investment from the founders of K4-MA, with $25,000 of which being services in kind from Keiretsu Forum sponsors Drucker & Scaccetti and BakerHostetler. Keiretsu Forum is a global angel investor network with more than 1500 accredited investor members throughout 39 chapters on three continents (accredited investors are individuals who earn at least $200,000 annually and have $1 million net worth). Keiretsu Forum Mid-Atlantic consists of four chapters that function as a single entity – Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. Metro, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Girls Auto Clinic is an organization dedicated to changing the perception of women in the automotive industry through both education and niche marketing. Roughly less than 2% of mechanics and auto technicians are women. Through Banks’ entrepreneurial efforts, Girls Auto Clinic has been able to support the role of women in the automotive environment through trust, education and, ultimately, inclusion by changing the way men look at their female counterparts; both for the better and for all time.
Banks was tired of being a victim of sexist discrimination with auto repairs. She took that frustration and turned it into a business venture. After seeing the glaring neglect of women working in the automotive industry, she made it her personal mission to empower and educate other women car owners with her knowledge. In 2012, she decided to enroll herself in classes to become a certified mechanic. She did so while still juggling her full-time job as an engineer for a year and a half.
For more information about the Girls Auto Clinic, click here.
article by Carolyn M. Brown via blackenterprise.com
Posts published in “Commemorations”
When you arrive at Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, you’re given an enslaved person’s image and story to wear for the day. Mine was Ann Hawthorne, who was 85 years old when the Library of Congress’s Federal Writer’s Project recorded her personal story of growing up enslaved on the Whitney Plantation, one of many plantations along the Mississippi’s winding River Road. Each story is printed on a laminated card that you wear around your neck—a physical manifestation of the history of slavery; a reminder that real people lived here, died here.
Billed as America’s first-ever museum dedicated exclusively to American slavery, Whitney Plantation sits amid acres of sugar cane that, on the late afternoon of my visit, swayed in a wild wind from a passing tropical depression. The plantation’s swampy land lay heavy with ankle-deep water and hummed with voracious mosquitos. A long row of black and white umbrellas leaned against the visitors’ center and gift shop so that those who had paid $22 a head to tour the grounds were not made uncomfortable by the day’s fine, cool mist of rain.
As I waited for my tour guide, a black woman with long braids led a tour group past a white church, where statues of a young Ann Hawthorne and a dozen other enslaved children seemed to stare directly at—or, really, into—the visitors, who watched a video featuring their testimony.
The entire museum is similar: You walk the same pathways that victims of chattel slavery walked, you listen to their stories in their own words, you see and hear the pieces of history that aren’t printed in textbooks or told on other plantation tours. You won’t find much information on the wealthy slaveowners on this plantation. Instead, Whitney presents slavery through the stories of those who experienced it.
The museum’s creation is owed in part to Dr. Ibrahima Seck, a tall, dark man with a florid African accent, who built the museum along with Whitney’s owner, white New Orleans attorney John Cummings. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Antebellum South, and it’s clear that everyone working at Whitney regards him as a living exhibit.
“According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database, 60 percent of the people in Louisiana came from Senegambia, my area of Africa,” Dr. Seck told me. “So there are very strong ties here from my home.”
Seck had agreed to give me a private tour, so we climbed into his golf cart and drove past a small, rusty jail. Through its cage bars, we could see the slave masters’ 220-year-old “Big House” in the distance.
“This jail wasn’t on this plantation,” said Dr. Seck, driving faster now so the mosquitos wouldn’t catch up. “It was found in Gonzales, Louisiana, buried in the mud. At the slave markets in New Orleans, this is where the slaves were locked up before being sold.”
There is no fiction here. There is nothing you can deny here. — Dr. Ibrahima Seck
Past seven small cypress wood cabins, which at one time slept dozens of slaves apiece, Seck stopped the cart at the marble Wall of Honor, which displays the names of over 350 people who were once enslaved at Whitney, plus how much each sold for and why. Seck, who originally gleaned all this information from documents found on the property, pointed out enslaved people who were deemed less valuable: a one-armed driver, a mentally-disabled woman, an old man with a hernia. Their prices were lower, but their fate was the same.
“Mentally-disabled or old slaves might be assigned to watch the master’s toddlers or something,” Dr. Seck said. “They sold for less, but were never retired. You worked till you died.”
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is establishing the Perry E. Wallace Scholarship to honor the first African American to play a varsity sport in the Southeastern Conference. The scholarship will be awarded to a student in the School of Engineering, where Wallace earned his bachelor’s degree in 1970. Wallace is now a professor in the College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C.
After graduating from Vanderbilt, Wallace went on to earn a law degree at Columbia University. He then worked for the U.S. Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. Before joining the faculty at American University in 1993, Professor Wallace taught at Howard University and the University of Baltimore.
The saga of Wallace’s integration of varsity athletics in the Southeastern Conference is told in the biography Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014)
article via jbhe.com
COLUMBIA, Missouri (AP) — One of the University of Missouri’s first black law school graduates was appointed Thursday to lead the four-campus system through a tumultuous period of racial unrest, drawing praise from students who said he’s well-equipped to confront the problems they felt his predecessor largely ignored.
Michael Middleton, 68, has spent 30 years at the university — as an undergraduate, law student, faculty member and finally, administrator. At a news conference announcing his appointment as the university system’s interim president, he vowed to take on the racial problems that inspired the protests that helped force Monday’s abrupt resignation of President Tim Wolfe and another top administrator.
Middleton takes over as black student groups, calling for change over the administration’s handling of racial issues, were given a boost last weekend when 30 black football players vowed not to take part in team activities until Wolfe was gone.
Middleton said the university “has faced its share of troubling incidents and we recognize that we must move forward as a community. We must embrace these issues as they come, and they will come to define us in the future.”
article by Summer Ballentine and Alan Scher Zagier, AP via thegrio.com
Associated Press writers Jim Suhr and Jim Salter in St. Louis and AP researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON, Nov 11 (Reuters) – All recent U.S. military veterans and their families will now be offered in-state tuition rates to public colleges and universities throughout the country, the White House said on Wednesday.
Announced in honor of the U.S. federal holiday Veterans Day, which fell on Wednesday, the change is part of President Barack Obama‘s “steadfast commitment” to military families and aims to make sure veterans can both access and get the most out of higher education, administration officials said.
Officials also announced the launch of a revamped comparison tool to offer veteran-specific admissions statistics, which aims to help applicants better evaluate programs, and a new effort to curb deceptive enrollment tactics used by schools aiming to recruit veterans.
Cecilia Munoz, a top domestic policy adviser to the president, said while Obama is pressing his administration to push these changes forward quickly, he is also calling on Congress to move forward on three pieces of legislation to help improve veterans’ education.
“These pieces of legislation will really ensure that veterans have the opportunities and assistance to … realize the American dream,” Munoz told reporters on a conference call.
One bill would heighten standards for schools receiving G.I. Bill funds, while another would help protect G.I. Bill benefits for veterans whose schools close mid-term. A third, just introduced on Tuesday, would increase regulation of for-profit colleges, many of which target veterans.
“What we think this does is ramp up the accountability” of those schools, Munoz said, adding that it ensures “we are requiring a high-quality education for veterans that have served us well.”
article by Megan Cassella and Sandra Maler via huffingtonpost.com
Suzan-Lori Parks, who teaches creative writing at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, has been chosen as the winner of the 2015 Gish Prize, established through the will of the late actress Lillian Gish. The prize, considered among the top honors in the arts, comes with a cash award valued at $300,000.
The Gish Prize Trust said that Parks’ work “challenges contemporary conceptions of race, sexuality, family and society, and is distinguished by its striking wordplay, vibrant wit, and uninhibited style.” Parks will be honored at a ceremony on November 30 at the Public Theater in New York.
Parks is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is a former MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” winner. Professor Parks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her play “Topdog/Underdog.”
article via jbhe.com
Three of our all-time favorite black girls have been named to TIME’s annual 30 Most Influential Teens list. Malia Obama, Zendaya Coleman, and Amandla Stenburg are honored by TIME for their “accolades across numerous fields, global impact through social media and overall ability to drive news.”
The oldest First Daughter, Malia, is described as a “full-fledged cultural icon” by TIME. That title is perfect for the first daughter whose fashion choices and college visits are followed by millions of Americans. Like her parents, this 17-year-old Obama has big things ahead of her.
Former Disney Channel star Zendaya Coleman earned her spot on the list for emerging as a positive voice and role model for girls everywhere. She unapologetically reminds the media body positivity. In this year alone she eloquently schooled E!’s Giuliana Rancic for mocking her dreadlocks at the Oscars and shared unretouched photos from a magazine photoshoot.
17-year-old Amandla Stenburg lands a spot on TIME’s list for being a bold active critique of pop culture. Earlier this year the talented actress known for her role as Rue in “The Hunger Games” made the video “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows” which detailed cultural appropriation in pop culture and went viral. Not only is Amandla a talented actress and pop culture critic, she is also a musician and author.
Congratulations to these young women! We can’t wait to see the continued impact they will surely have on society!
article via theculture.forharriet.com
DURHAM, N.C. — John Hope Franklin, a scholar who helped create the field of African-American history, was instrumental both in documenting America’s long and long-ignored legacy of slavery and racism and in reaffirming the continuing importance of that history, Harvard President Drew Faust said during an event Thursday evening commemorating his life and scholarship.
“John Hope Franklin wrote history — discovering neglected and forgotten dimensions of the past, mining archives with creativity and care, building in the course of his career a changed narrative of the American experience and the meaning of race within it,” she said. “But John Hope also meditated about history and its place in the world, on its role as action as well as description, on history itself as causal agent, and on the writing of history as mission as well as profession.”
Franklin was born in 1915 and raised in segregated Oklahoma. Graduating from Fisk University in 1935, he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941. Over the course of his career, he held faculty posts at a number of institutions, including Howard University and the University of Chicago, before being appointed in 1983 the James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University. “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” published in 1947, is still considered a definitive account of the black experience in America. A lecture series later published as a book, “Racial Equality in America,” became another of his most iconic works. Franklin died in 2009.
An American historian herself, Faust gave the keynote address in the last of a yearlong series of events as part of the John Hope Franklin Centenary, sponsored by Duke University to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.
“John Hope Franklin wrote history — discovering neglected and forgotten dimensions of the past, mining archives with creativity and care, building in the course of his career a changed narrative of the American experience and the meaning of race within it,” she said. “But John Hope also meditated about history and its place in the world, on its role as action as well as description, on history itself as causal agent, and on the writing of history as mission as well as profession.”
Franklin was born in 1915 and raised in segregated Oklahoma. Graduating from Fisk University in 1935, he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941. Over the course of his career, he held faculty posts at a number of institutions, including Howard University and the University of Chicago, before being appointed in 1983 the James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University. “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” published in 1947, is still considered a definitive account of the black experience in America. A lecture series later published as a book, “Racial Equality in America,” became another of his most iconic works. Franklin died in 2009.
An American historian herself, Faust gave the keynote address in the last of a yearlong series of events as part of the John Hope Franklin Centenary, sponsored by Duke University to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Prolific producer Shonda Rhimes will receive the 2016 Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television at the 27th annual Producers Guild Awards on Saturday, Jan. 23.
Rhimes is the executive producer of ABC hits including Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder and Private Practice. She previously received the Norman Felton Award for outstanding producer of episodic television drama from the Producers Guild for her work on Grey’s Anatomy.
“Shonda Rhimes is one of the most passionate and insightful storytellers in entertainment today. Her pioneering work on Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How o Get Away With Murder has redefined the role of women in media and spurred the debate about diversity in television,” said co-chairs Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd in a statement. “Like the intelligent, strong, and fearless characters she creates, Shonda is a true force to be reckoned with and we are privileged to honor her with this year’s Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television.”
Added Rhimes: “To be the recipient of an award bestowed upon me by my peers in the PGA is truly an honor. The fact that the award is named after a legendary producer whose work has had such an inspiring effect on my growth as a writer is genuinely gratifying. I couldn’t be more grateful for this special recognition.”
Rhimes is the executive producer of ABC hits including Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder and Private Practice. She previously received the Norman Felton Award for outstanding producer of episodic television drama from the Producers Guild for her work on Grey’s Anatomy.
“Shonda Rhimes is one of the most passionate and insightful storytellers in entertainment today. Her pioneering work on Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How o Get Away With Murder has redefined the role of women in media and spurred the debate about diversity in television,” said co-chairs Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd in a statement. “Like the intelligent, strong, and fearless characters she creates, Shonda is a true force to be reckoned with and we are privileged to honor her with this year’s Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television.”
Added Rhimes: “To be the recipient of an award bestowed upon me by my peers in the PGA is truly an honor. The fact that the award is named after a legendary producer whose work has had such an inspiring effect on my growth as a writer is genuinely gratifying. I couldn’t be more grateful for this special recognition.”
Last year the same award went to Rhimes’ fellow Grey’s Anatomy executive producer Mark Gordon. Previous recipients include Chuck Lorre, J.J. Abrams, Don Mischer, Dick Wolf, Jerry Bruckheimer, John Wells, Lorne Michaels, David L. Wolper, Don Hewitt, Garry K. Marshall, Aaron Spelling, Steven Bochco, David E. Kelley, Mark Burnett and Norman Lear himself.
Rhimes’ big-screen credits include Crossroads and The Princess Diaries 2. Her first book, Year of Yes, comes out Nov. 10.
article by Kate Stanhope via hollywoodreporter.com
Rhimes’ big-screen credits include Crossroads and The Princess Diaries 2. Her first book, Year of Yes, comes out Nov. 10.
article by Kate Stanhope via hollywoodreporter.com