The family of slain teen Michael Brown, who senselessly died early last month at the hands of Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson, are now in Atlanta to kick off a nationwide effort to arm police with body cameras, according to WSB-TV.
Brown’s parents, Lesley McSpadden (pictured right) and Michael Brown Sr. (pictured), are trying to get legislation, the Michael Brown law, passed that will require officers to sport body cameras while on duty.
According to the couple, if Wilson would have been wearing the body camera, there would be no questions as to the tragic turn of events that led to their son’s murder. Wearing cameras have been associated with dramatic reductions in use of force and complaints against officers.
The couple attended a rally on Sunday that was held at a Baptist church in Atlanta. The pair reportedly felt Atlanta was a great place to start with their body camera quest, because the city’s chief of police is already on board with the body-worn camera project. At the rally, McSpadden and Brown met Jacqueline Johnson, the Mother of slain teen Kendrick, whose unusual death still has investigators baffled.
Kendrick, a 17-year-old Georgia high school student, was found dead with his body placed in a rolled-up wrestling mat at his school gymnasium. At first an investigation and autopsy deemed Johnson’s death accidental, but then his family hired a private pathologist who concluded he passed away from blunt force trauma. Johnson’s family members are reportedly convinced the teen’s death was racially motivated as he had been attacked and victimized previously by a white student.
The stop in the southern city is just the first, as McSpadden and Brown are on a tour of gratitude that began in Atlanta and will end on Thursday in Washington, D.C.
In the nation’s capital, both McSpadden and Brown plan on campaigning for the Michael Brown legislation they are hoping will get placed on the books. The parents also want the federal government to take over the investigation of their son’s murder.
According to Benjamin Crump, the attorney who is representing both the Brown and Johnson families, Atlanta is a great place to begin their mission on getting laws passed for officers to wear body cameras, “We’re trying to make sure that this doesn’t happen to nobody else’s child, so we’re pushing for the Michael Brown laws to have body cameras on all these police officers,” he said. article by Ruth Manuel-Logan via newsone.com
Olivia Pope may strike fear in the hearts of corrupt politicians in D.C., but it’s Kerry Washington who is the gladiator in real life. This week, she’s bringing attention to the important issue of financial abuse.
What’s financial abuse, you ask? As Love is Respect explains, it is a form of dating abuse and domestic violence that can often be very subtle. This, however, is what you really need to know: “At no point does someone you are dating have the right to use money or [dictate] how you spend it to control you.”
In her PSA for the initiative, Washington notes how “one in four women will be a victim of domestic violence.” She goes on to explain how finances are often “a weapon of choice.” This can include taking away access to cash or destroying someone’s credit.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yy7d3uf7qw&w=560&h=315]
As an Allstate Foundation Purple Purse Ambassador, Washington designed a bag for the “Purple Purse” initiative. Why purple? It’s the color often associated with domestic violence awareness. And why design a purse? Washington said the purse is symbolic because that’s where you keep everything that is important to you.
According to the Purple Purse website, Washington says she is “extremely proud to wear it (her purse) and to know that it will increase awareness and create conversations around this important issue.”
So how can you help Kerry and her cause? When you donate at least $10 to any organization in the Purple Purse Challenge, you’ll have a chance at winning one of the purses Washington designed. article by Claire Biggs via act.mtv.com
One can help a community one is familiar with in order to make things beneficial for that community. The beauty of giving back is knowing who you are giving back to, the purpose you’re giving back and the satisfaction of realizing that the community grows based on the contribution you are making. Brian Benjamin knows this firsthand and it’s the crux of his real estate development firm, Genesis Companies.
BlackEnterprise.com was able to talk to Benjamin regarding the basis of the reason Genesis Companies has been in existence for over 10 years and growing stronger as more projects land on his plate. BlackEnterprise:com: You are a partner in Genesis Companies could you explain to us what that is and your role in the company? Brian Benjamin: Genesis Companies is a black-owned real estate development and construction company focused on enhancing urban communities through the development of high quality affordable and mixed-income residences in New York and New Jersey. My job is to find new development opportunities and help steer them through the predevelopment process. I also work to ensure that we have community support for our projects and that they benefit communities and improve neighborhoods. How did you get your start in your current business? Karim Hutson founded the company in 2004, and he was actually the first person I met on a Harvard Business School recruitment weekend when we were prospective students. He became a very good friend and so I was around Genesis since inception until I joined officially in 2010. What gets you up in the morning to run your business?
Knowing that I am playing a role in creating quality affordable housing for residents is a great feeling. In many urban centers, like my community of Harlem, there is a lack of low-income and middle-income living opportunities, so doing something about it is challenging and rewarding. How important, if it is important, is it to have a Black company doing business in Black communities for the benefit of Black people?
It is quite important. We primarily partner with nonprofits and churches, where trust is essential. They are giving us the power to build or renovate housing for their constituents so when they see us and communicate with us and understand that we are just like them, it puts them at ease. Furthermore, having grown up in primarily African-American communities, we understand first-hand some of the issues that our communities face due to poor quality housing, such as asthma or lack of security, and so we are very focused creating healthy and safe living environments. We know the experience of our residents, and I believe that makes us better developers. I know this is your 10-year anniversary of Genesis, what was/is the most important thing your company has done that you are most proud of or is a high point in your 10 years?
First and foremost is surviving for 10 years through difficult economic times. It is hard work starting and growing a business in the development space. As a result, we are able to employ people and feed families, which will only grow over time. Additionally, we provided community space, at below-market rent, on the ground floor of one of our residential buildings in Harlem for a Dream Center to help underserved children and families. I recently did a site visit of the center, which is operated by First Corinthian Baptist Church, to view its progress and I was blown away by what the church is doing with the space. The amount of young people, who are impacted on a daily basis, as a result of the work we do is very gratifying.
The New York City Fire Department promoted a black woman to the rank of lieutenant for the first time in 12 years. Tracey Lewis was promoted Wednesday. She’s the second-ever black female firefighter to be promoted to lieutenant in the department’s history.
Lewis has been a firefighter for 17 years, starting off as a cadet. She was an emergency medical technician and later worked on Engine 222 in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn.
There are only nine black women firefighters at the FDNY. There are about 40 women total at the department of nearly 10,400 people. The department said it has promoted three women to lieutenant and one to captain this year.
Ella McNair was the first black woman promoted to rank of lieutenant in 2002.
Mr. Cory’s Cookies CEO Cory Nieves (Photo: Facebook) Cory Nieves wants to become a household name because of his decadent cookies. CBS News reports that every Saturday, Nieves can be found along with his wagon cart of treats, selling homemade cookies to clients at various city locations. In an interview, Nieves told a CBS reporter the reason why his cookies are so good is because they are “made with love”… and without preservatives. Nieves founded his company, Mr. Cory’s Cookies at the age of five. Currently, he is the founder, CEO and head of distribution for his company. He created Mr. Cory’s when he and his mother moved from the Bronx to Englewood, New Jersey; his mother recalls the conversation that birthed his business:
“One day, we were on the bus and he just came out and was like, ‘Ma, you know, I wanna get a car or whatever. Cause it’s too cold.’ I said, ‘Cory, how am I gettin’ a car, off of my looks?’ I told him that and then, he said, ‘Well, we can sell hot cocoa. And then, he wanted to add something to that, like, something, a dessert base. And he wanted to try the cookies.”
Although Nieves did not know much about baking, he set forth to research the craft before making into an enterprise. He shared: “I didn’t really know. I just looked it up with some magazines, websites. Looked it up. Little search. ‘What is this? How you make that?’ And I didn’t like the recipes, so I just started changin’ it around.” From a humble beginning in his home kitchen, Nieves has now moved into a commercial space to bake his desserts. He sells a thousand cookies a weekend at about $1 a piece.
Besides becoming a culinary mogul, Nieves would like to own a fashion line. With over 30,000 followers on Instagram and press appearances, his most recent on The Ellen Degeneres Show we are sure Nieves will be a name we won’t forget. See more at: http://madamenoire.com/470750/new-jersey-ten-year-old-builds-delicious-empire/#sthash.QK6qqzrd.dpuf
WASHINGTON — President Obama has tried to use the power of his office to combat sexual assaults on college campuses. On Friday, he got some help.
In a speech from the East Room, the president announced “It’s on Us,” a nationwide public service campaign aimed at urging young people to do more to prevent campus sexual assaults. Mr. Obama called for a “fundamental shift in our culture” in the way women are treated and in the response to victims of sexual assault.
“From sports leagues to pop culture to politics, our society does not sufficiently value women,” Mr. Obama said. “We still don’t condemn sexual assault as loudly as we should.”
At the event, the administration debuted a 30-second video, which features celebrities including the actors Kerry Washington and Jon Hamm, the musician Questlove, and NBA star Kevin Love.
Officials said the celebrities involved would know how to get through to the millennial generation.
Mr. Love, who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Olivia Munn, an actress in the HBO series “The Newsroom,” attended the announcement. Mr. Obama also put a heavy emphasis on engaging men in the conversation.
“It is not just on parents of young women to caution them, it is on the parents of young men to teach them respect for women,” Mr. Obama said. “It is on grown men to set an example and be clear about what it means to be a man.”
A court said Brooklyn prosecutors buried documents in the kidnapping case of Everton Wagstaffe. (Credit: Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times)
Everton Wagstaffe, who refused to leave prison on probation because he viewed it as a surrender of his claim of innocence in the death of a teenage girl, learned on Wednesday that he had prevailed in a struggle that he began from behind bars nearly 23 years ago.
A panel of state appeals court judges unanimously reversed the kidnapping convictions of Mr. Wagstaffe and his co-defendant, Reginald Connor, finding that Brooklyn prosecutors in 1992 and 1993 were responsible for “burying” documents that might have shown that detectives and the prime witness had lied. The panel also dismissed the indictments of the two men.
A spokeswoman for Kenneth P. Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, who has pledged to aggressively hunt down injustice, said the decision was being reviewed. Reginald Connor’s conviction was also reversed. (Credit: Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times)
Mr. Connor, 46, served 15 years, and now works for a film-production company. For the moment, Mr. Wagstaffe, 45, remains in state prison. He has been in custody since his arrest at age 23 in January 1992.
Over the years, he has refused to accept release on any terms — such as parole or probation — that would imply he had something to do with the kidnapping and death of Jennifer Negron, a 16-year-old girl whose body was found on a street in the East New York section of Brooklyn on Jan. 1, 1992. “Finally,” Mr. Connor said on Wednesday afternoon, sounding dazed. “Finally.”
He learned of the decision just after leaving a meeting with lawyers from Davis Polk & Wardwell, who had been representing him pro bono for the last several years.
Mr. Wagstaffe first heard of the ruling in a call with a family member, who asked not to be identified, but said Mr. Wagstaffe had insisted that the entire ruling be read to him. “ ‘You cry for both of us,’ ” the family member quoted Mr. Wagstaffe as saying. “ ‘I want to research part of it.’ ”
If the case comes to an end now, it would be the final chapter of an epic guerrilla legal battle waged by Mr. Wagstaffe. He entered prison with minimal literacy and taught himself to read. He then wrote hundreds of letters pleading for help in finding the physical evidence from the case so DNA testing could be done, and in finding missing witnesses. For much of that time, he had no legal counsel. He drafted his own legal papers and succeeded in being granted hearings, though not in getting any relief.
Shawon Jackson went to Princeton University via the Questbridge program and is president of the student government there. (Michael Kirby Smith, NEW YORK TIMES)
Arianna Trickey was opening a piece of mail in her bedroom during junior year of high school when a pamphlet fell out of the envelope. The pamphlet seemed to offer the impossible: the prospect of a full scholarship to several of her dream colleges.
She went running out to her father, a house painter, who was sitting on the family’s porch in Grass Valley, a California city in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “You have to see this,” she told him. “This is the scholarship that will get me to the best schools in the country.”
The pamphlet was from a nonprofit organization called QuestBridge, which has quietly become one of the biggest players in elite-college admissions. Almost 300 undergraduates at Stanford this year, or 4 percent of the student body, came through QuestBridge. The share at Amherst is 11 percent, and it’s 9 percent at Pomona. At Yale, the admissions office has changed its application to make it more like QuestBridge’s.
Founded by a married couple in Northern California — she an entrepreneur, he a doctor-turned-medical-investor — QuestBridge has figured out how to convince thousands of high-achieving, low-income students that they really can attend a top college. “It’s like a national admissions office,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar.
The growth of QuestBridge has broader lessons for higher education — and for closing the yawning achievement gap between rich and poor teenagers. That gap is one of the biggest reasons that moving up the economic ladder is so hard in the United States today. But QuestBridge’s efforts are innovative enough to deserve their own attention.
In addition to the hundreds of its students on college campuses today, hundreds more have graduated over the last decade. They’ve gone on to become professors, teachers, business people, doctors and many other things. Ms. Trickey, a senior at the University of Virginia who is also getting a master’s in education, plans to become an elementary-school teacher in a low-income area.
College admissions officers attribute the organization’s success to the simplicity of its approach to students. It avoids mind-numbingly complex talk of financial-aid forms and formulas that scare away so many low-income families (and frustrate so many middle-income families, like my own when I was applying to college). QuestBridge instead gives students a simple message: If you get in, you can go.
Yet the broader lessons of QuestBridge aren’t only about how to communicate with students. They’re also how our society spends the limited resource that is financial aid.
The group’s founders, Michael and Ana Rowena McCullough, are now turning their attention to the estimated $3 billion in outside scholarships, from local Rotary Clubs, corporations and other groups, that are awarded every year to high school seniors. The McCulloughs see this money as a wasted opportunity, saying it comes too late to affect whether and where students go to college. It doesn’t help the many high-achieving, low-income strivers who don’t apply to top colleges — and often don’t graduate from any college.
“Any private scholarship given at the end of senior year is intrinsically disconnected from the college application process,” Dr. McCullough said, “and it doesn’t have to be.”
They plan to offer prizes in some cases to high school juniors, like a summer program or a free laptop, to persuade them to apply. To win the prize, the junior would need to fill out a detailed application, which could become the basis for his or her college application. The idea draws on social science research, which has shown that people often respond better to tangible, short-term incentives (a free laptop) than to complicated, longer-term ones (a college degree, which will improve your life and which you can afford). Two pilot programs started with donors — one focused on New Yorkers, one on low-income Jewish students — have had encouraging results, the McCulloughs say.
QuestBridge has its roots in summer programs they started as Stanford students in the 1980s and 1990s. The initial one helped Dr. McCullough, who had paid his own way through Stanford, win a Rhodes scholarship.
Terranisha Hiley is a senior at Columbia University. (Ruth Fremson, NEW YORK TIMES)
The programs tried to lift the ambitions of talented teenagers from modest backgrounds, by introducing them to peers and to successful adults. “The combination of seeing what can be done and then having someone you respect telling you you can do it — I think that’s what most young people need,” said Nico Slate, who attended a program in 1996. A native of a small town in the Mojave Desert, he is now a history professor at Carnegie Mellon and studies social movements in India and the United States.
Eventually, the McCulloughs realized the growing applicant pool to their summer program consisted of exactly the students whom top colleges said they wanted to recruit. So the couple began approaching admissions officers with plans for a new program the colleges would help pay for. QuestBridge uses traditional databases, like those with SAT scores, as well as networks of high school teachers and others to recruit students. It has an early application deadline, in late September, and a long application form, designed to get students to tell the story of their lives.
Kadeian Brown, left, and Judian Brown own Black Girls Divine Beauty Supply and Salon, off Church Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn. (Kirsten Luce for The New York Times)
Not much seems unusual about Judian Brown and Kadeian Brown’s storefront in a tidy plaza off Church Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, a neighborhood where every block seems to have its own African hair-braiding salon.
Posters of African-American women with long, sleek hair fill the window. Round jars of shea butter belly up to slender boxes of hair dye on the shelves. Wigs perch on mannequin heads.
What makes Black Girls Divine Beauty Supply and Salon’s visitors do a double-take is the skin color of the proprietors. “I go, ‘Look at all the faces on the boxes,’ ” said Judian Brown, recalling other shopkeepers’ and customers’ surprise when they realize she is not an employee, but the owner. “Who should be owning these stores?”
The Brown sisters’ is one small shop in a multibillion-dollar industry, centered on something that is both a point of pride and a political flash point for black women: their hair. But the Browns are among only a few hundred black owners of the roughly 10,000 stores that sell hair products like relaxers, curl creams, wigs and hair weaves to black women, not just in New York but across the country. The vast majority have Korean-American owners, a phenomenon dating back to the 1970s that has stoked tensions between black consumers and Korean businesspeople over what some black people see as one ethnic group profiting from, yet shutting out, another.
A growing awareness of this imbalance has spurred more black people to hang out their own shingles. The people producing the products have changed, too: As “going natural” — abandoning artificially smoothed hair in favor of naturally textured curls and braids — has become more popular and the Internet has expanded, black entrepreneurs, most of them women, are claiming a bigger share of the shelves in women’s medicine cabinets.
“We’re aware of where our dollars are going, we’re aware of the power of our dollars, we’re aware of the cultural significance of the way that we choose to wear our hair,” said Patrice Grell Yursik, the founder of Afrobella, a popular natural-hair blog. “There’s been a lot of taking back the power, and a lot of that is from the Internet.”
Seventeen years ago, her doctor’s words shook her like an earthquake: “If you don’t lose weight, you won’t get to your 60th birthday.” Vivian Stancil, a retired Long Beach school teacher, was 50. She stood 5 feet tall and weighed 319 pounds.
“A bowling ball wouldn’t even describe what I was,” Stancil says. “I could barely walk. But I wanted to live, so I instantly knew what I had to do: change my diet and start exercising.”
That would not be easy. Stancil’s social life revolved around going out to eat every day with her friends. As for exercise, Stancil hadn’t done it in 40 years — ever, really. She not only didn’t know how to swim but was so afraid of water that she couldn’t dunk her head in past her eyes.
On top of that, she was legally blind.
Nearly two decades later, at 67, Stancil not only lived but became one of the country’s most honored age-group Senior Olympics swimmers, with 176 medals. In June, 1976 Olympic gold-medal swimmer John Naber presented her with the prestigious Personal Best Award, given once a year to the senior athlete who best helps to spread the word about health and wellness.
Circumstances made Stancil an unlikely role model. Stancil and her three siblings were separated and placed in foster homes when both parents had died by the time she was 7. At 16, pressured into a marriage by her cash-strapped foster parents, Stancil had two children and began slowly losing her sight because of an inherited condition called retinitis pigmentosa. Divorced at 20 and raising the kids alone on welfare, she survived a self-described “two-year pity party,” got married and divorced again, and started working as a Head Start preschool teacher in her late 20s. That would prove to be her salvation.
She earned a two-year degree in early education, married for the third and final time, to an usher at her church named Turner Stancil, and went on to get a bachelor’s degree from La Verne College. For the next decade, as her eyesight deteriorated, she was the first and only blind teacher in the Riverside and Long Beach school districts. She retired early in her late 40s.
“I did not lose weight with that,” she says with a laugh. “I’d carry pliers to loosen the wires or just drink protein shakes — lots of them.” Stancil did not laugh, however, several days after she turned 50, when her doctor told her the party was over. “The next day, I broke the news to the Eating Club: ‘I love you all, but you’re killing me. ‘So this is goodbye. But before I go, I need your help: What sport should I do?'” The Eating Club pondered. “‘You’re too fat to run or ride a bike,’ they said,” recalls Stancil. “‘What about swimming? After all, fat floats.'”
But, determined to live, she eventually found her way to Bob Hirschhorn, an instructor at Silverado Park Pool who was well-versed in training middle-aged adults petrified of the water. Her sight wasn’t a problem, save for her inability to see lane lines painted on the pool bottom, Hirschhorn says.
