Christina Bijou holds a sign during a rally outside the Department of Justice, August 27, 2014, in Washington, to call on the Attorney General Eric Holder to help secure justice for Michael Brown and the people of Ferguson. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
On August 22, almost two weeks after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Columbia University professor Fredrick Harris titled “Will Ferguson be a moment or a movement?”
I started working on my piece about the new era of black activism (which you can read here) months ago, and so I read Harris’s op-ed with the same level of irritation that made me want to write that piece in the first place. Not that there isn’t any value in what Harris wrote, because there certainly is. But if you’re asking the question “Where is the movement?” you simply haven’t been paying attention.
“A moment of trauma can oftentimes present you with an opportunity to do something about the situation to prevent that trauma from happening again,” Charlene Carruthers, national coordinator for Black Youth Project 100, told me in an interview for that piece, and the millennial generation has been presented with trauma after trauma. The killing of Sean Bell, the over-prosecution of the Jena Six, the killing of Oscar Grant, the killing of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, the killing of Trayvon Martin and so many more moments that may not have captured the national media attention but those events have defined the late adolescence and early adulthood of black folks of the millennial generation. As part of that demographic, let me say: the trauma has been fucking exhausting.
So, too, has been the haranguing from older generations that we have been too apathetic, that we have been too “post-racial,” that we have not done our part in upholding the legacy of the civil-rights movement. And so I wanted to write a corrective to that narrative, as I’ve seen my generation take up the fight and organize and begin along the hard road to movement building. It’s happening at this very moment. It was happening before Michael Brown was killed.
Harris writes: “What may keep Ferguson from becoming a national transformative event is if “justice” is narrowly confined to seeking relief for Brown and his family. If the focus is solely on the need for formal charges against Wilson, a fair trial, a conviction, a wrongful-death lawsuit—rather than seeing those things as part of a broader movement that tackles stand-your-ground laws, the militarization of local police, a requirement that cameras be worn by police on duty and the need for a comprehensive federal racial-profiling law. If justice remains solely personal, rather than universal.”
But that work had already begun before Ferguson erupted. The Dream Defenders traveled to the United Nations to present a case against “stand-your-ground” laws, and BYP100 recently organized an action at the Chicago Police Department headquarters to address discrepancies in marijuana arrests. The movement is here. The pictures are not as arresting as what comes from a moment like Ferguson, and therefore aren’t as compelling to media outlets only interested in the sensational. But the criminalization of black youth has emerged as the central focus of organizing efforts for the millennial generation and the work is being done.
On Twitter, filmmaker/writer/activist dream hampton called millennials the “Movement Generation.” It fits. article by Mychal Denzel Smith via thenation.com
Tameka Lawson is changing her Chicago neighborhood one yoga pose as at a time. Lawson, a yoga enthusiast for only a year, is the executive director of I Grow Chicago, a non-profit organization in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.
Lawson said she started practicing yoga because she needed to learn how to slow down and relax, and she thought the idea of bringing it to her community would bring people closer together. From The Huffington Post:
Not long after she took up yoga, the student became a teacher as she began to lead classes for youth in Englewood through her organization.
Initially, the classes took place inside the five area schools her group works with as a means of helping the young students cope with the stresses of their environment. While Lawson does go through basic yoga poses and breathing exercises with her young students, the lessons she hopes they will take away from her work extend far beyond the practice of yoga itself.
Built into each class, she says, are elements of art therapy, motivational speaking, mentoring and job skills. Yoga is simply the gateway to that information.
“There are lots of elements causing these youth to have stress,” Lawson said. “We want to get at the center of these youth and give them a moment to breathe in a way that will change the way they react and process things.”
The classes have been such a hit that Lawson and her group have taken their show on the road — or, more specifically, to the street. They’ve held regular, free community yoga classes on a blocked-off stretch of 64th Street, and are also offering free lessons the first Monday of every month at Kusanya Cafe.
“If we can prevent one 8-year-old from growing up to become a person who could potentially pick up a gun, we’ve succeeded,” she said. “If we can intervene for a 14-year-old who has made bad choices from making another bad choice, we’ve succeeded. If a 28-year-old who says he wants to stop selling drugs and just needs the opportunity, we’ve succeeded. We don’t have the answers, but we’re trying to come up with creative solutions.” article via clutchmagonline.com
If Estella Pyfrom looks familiar, it’s because she was recognized last year as a CNN Hero, a honor she received for the humanitarian genius behind her Brilliant Bus initiative, which really is quite brilliant.
Pyfrom, a retired 50-year veteran of Florida’s Palm Beach County School District, didn’t have any training in technology before she realized students in her district lacked the digital know-how to meet the demands of the 21st century workforce. “The minute I decided that [in retirement] I wanted to continue what I was doing for 50 years [as a school administrator], I knew I needed to be creative, and I needed to understand it,” Pyfrom said in a phone interview.
So Pyfrom, who is now 76, brushed up on her tech skills in 2009 and emptied her pension to build a non-profit, state-of-the-art mobile learning center called Project Aspiration, which was later renamed Estella’s Brilliant Bus. She’s been offering free tutoring to students since 2011.
Students who were among the winners of the #YESWECODE Hackathon at the 2014 ESSENCE Festival for their GlucoReader app rode from Florida to New Orleans on Estella’s Brilliant Bus, and Pyfrom takes great pride in her affiliation with the winners.
And that’s just one of many success stories tied to Pyfrom and her work. She spoke to us about what’s next for her organization. ESSENCE: Why did you decide to launch your Brilliant Bus? Estella Pyfrom: I started Brilliant Bus in an effort to expose kids to technology. I became passionate about technology when I realized that it would give kids so much exposure and different ways to connect with the world. I also just looked at what was going on in the community. When I was building my curriculum, I coordinated with area schools so that I could correlate what I was doing on the bus with what students were doing at school. I started working with kids at day care centers, churches, schools and community centers, and I ended up being able to offer a program for kids at all levels to prepare them for standardized tests, readiness tests and GED tests. ESSENCE: What’s special about this method of teaching? EP: Not only is it unique and innovative, it’s an idea that works. The Brilliant Bus is customized and I built it from scratch. The bus is a mobile learning lab and it can do whatever a classroom can do. Instead of kids who live in undeserved neighborhoods finding me, I am able to take the learning to the neighborhoods. ESSENCE: What do your students tell you is their favorite part of the Brilliant Bus? EP: Kids will do anything to get out of the classroom. They say it’s like going on a field trip. One of the good things they tell me is that the activities [on the bus] are so much in sync with what they are doing in the classroom and that it’s a good supplement. Everything that I do with kids on the bus is grade and age level appropriate. ESSENCE: What’s next for the bus? How will you expand on it? EP: Brilliant Bus isn’t just a bus; it’s a movement. We plan on building these clubs in various communities. We’re conducting surveys now so that we can move beyond coding and into Robotics. We are going to get really creative with science and math so we can build robots.
Don’t forget to follow the #YESWECODE conversation on Twitter and keep up with Estella’s Brilliant Bus on Facebook. article via essence.com
Although the U.S. Supreme Court was “once a leader in the world” in the battle for racial equality, recent decisions by the high court undermine its role in solving a “real racial problem” in America, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in an interview with The National Law Journal last Wednesday.
Citing recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and racially biased stop-and-frisk policies, Ginsburg reflected on the perpetuation of racial segregation in America, comparing the challenges with those of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
“Once [gay] people began to say who they were, you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it could be your child, and we found people we admired,” she said. “That understanding still doesn’t exist with race; you still have separation of neighborhoods, where the races are not mixed. It’s the familiarity with people who are gay that still doesn’t exist for race and will remain that way for a long time as long as where we live remains divided.”
But instead of upholding the court’s history as a powerful stalwart against racial discrimination, the Roberts court’s recent decisions upholding affirmative action bans and restricting voting rights have not “helped” the country advance, Ginsburg explained.
“What’s amazing is how things have changed,” Ginsburg said, recalling the landmark 1971 decision of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that employer policies that look neutral on paper can still constitute discrimination if they disproportionately harm minorities in practice. “It was a very influential decision and it was picked up in England. That’s where the court was heading in the ’70s.”
Singling out the Voting Rights Act as the most powerful law “in terms of making people count in a democracy,” Ginsburg reiterated her opposition to the court’s majority 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key provision that helped safeguard against racial discrimination in voting laws.
Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West All-Stars (Photo: TWITTER)
The Jackie Robinson West All-Stars are still the pride of Chicago, even after a tough loss to South Korea in the Little League World Series championship game. The Jackie Robinson West team put up a valiant fight, including a late rally in the bottom of the sixth inning, but in the end it was not enough to hold off the mighty bats and dominant pitching performance from the Seoul team, which handed the South Side Chicago sluggers an 8-4 loss.
According to the Associated Press, normal Sunday activities in Chicago were on hold for a few hours while the all-black Jackie Robinson West ballplayers, who “made their first appearance in 31 years in the Little League World Series” and had stolen the nation’s heart on their way to the championship game, took the field.
Several hundred supporters gathered at TV watch stations to root for the team, which, until the final game, had dominated all comers.
AP notes that despite the defeat, several fans gathered at the South Side community center gym and roared and cheered just as if their boys had won. “They showed what heart they have. The city could not be prouder of them,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told AP.
Jackie Robinson West’s run was a nice break for an area that has been ravished by poverty and violence.
“I have never seen the community come together like this,” Eldridge Dockery, 44, told AP. “We’re usually behind our walls or gates—but this team brought us out, talking and celebrating together.”
According to news station WGN-TV, a parade is planned for the team on Wednesday.
Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, at his funeral in St. Louis. (RICHARD PERRY / THE NEW YORK TIMES)
ST. LOUIS — They came by the thousands to pay their respects. Among them were the parents and extended family — some 500 strong — of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed more than two weeks ago by a Ferguson police officer.
But the crowd of mourners also included the Rev. Jesse Jackson; film director Spike Lee; T. D. Jakes, the bishop of The Potter’s House, an African-American megachurch; several members of Congress; representatives from the White House; and two children of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
During a deeply religious service here on Monday at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, several speakers exhorted mourners to work for justice, not just for Mr. Brown but for others, long after the funeral was over.
“There is a cry being made from the ground, not just for Michael Brown, but for the Trayvon Martins, for those children in Sandy Hook Elementary School, for the Columbine massacre, for black-on-black crime,” the Rev. Charles Ewing, Mr. Brown’s uncle, said.
Speaking before the overflowing crowd, the Rev. Al Sharpton criticized the militarization of the police and their treatment of Mr. Brown, while calling on African-Americans to push for change instead of “sitting around having ghetto pity parties.”
On Sunday, relatives of Mr. Brown had asked for quiet during the funeral. The fatal shooting had set off weeks of protests and a severe police reaction in Ferguson. Several speakers echoed pleas from Mr. Brown’s family for people to refrain from protesting on Monday.
“Please don’t exacerbate the almost unbearable pain of this family,” said Bishop Edwin Bass of the Church of God in Christ. “It is imperative that we resist the temptation to react by rioting.”
Many mourners, most of whom were black, wore buttons showing Mr. Brown’s picture, and large photos of Mr. Brown stood at the front of the church. Rousing hymns by the Missouri Jurisdictional Choir repeatedly brought the entire crowd to their feet.
Among the family members who spoke, Cal Brown, Mr. Brown’s stepmother, said that just weeks before he was shot, Mr. Brown had described a dream in which he had seen bloody sheets hanging on a clothes line. “He pretty much prophesied his own death and he didn’t even realize it,” she said, calling him “an awesome man” who wanted to have a family and “be a good father.”
In addition to numerous readings from the Bible, there were readings from Dr. King and references to significant court cases in black history. Referring to the original determination in the Constitution that blacks were counted as three-fifths of a man for the purposes of voting, Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who is representing Mr. Brown’s family, said that the teenager “was not three-fifths of a citizen. He was an American citizen and we will not accept three-fifths justice.”
The photo, and the reaction to it, crystallized Ferguson’s uprising this month in all its anger and strangeness: a demonstrator in an American flag shirt, holding a bag of chips in one hand while hurling a canister of tear gas back at police with the other, leaving an arabesque of smoke in his wake. The image became so well-known that a man who said he was the demonstrator put details for booking requests on his Twitter profile. He got thousands of new Twitter followers.
St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, left, has more than 100,000 new Twitter followers due to his documenting of events since the police shooting of Michael Brown. (Roberto Rodriguez / European Pressphoto)
So too with Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman and budding celebrity, who in the space of 10 days gained more than 100,000 Twitter followers due to his relentless documenting of events good and bad after the police shooting of Michael Brown. People are wondering what higher office French might seek. And they say as much about Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, once a low-profile officer, placed in charge of maintaining security in Ferguson.
It’s become apparent that anyone who has played a contributing role in this city’s unsteady vortex has been reshaped in it. Along with fostering celebrity, events here have taken on a ritualistic quality, with protesters gathering night after night along a small stretch of West Florissant Avenue. “During the day, it’s a spectacle. At night, it’s a war zone,” Wes Suber, a 26-year-old sociology student from Ferguson, said one night this week.
There’s no one guiding events — Ferguson has been like a barreling train without an engineer — and the difficulties in organization were apparent. On Tuesday, community leaders halted a protest march to hold a prayer and lead some chants; they told demonstrators to go home and rest up for a protest outside the county justice building in nearby Clayton the next morning. But the crowd refused to go home. Instead, people milled around until there was another standoff with police.
The Positive Influence Basketball league has more than 800 players on 68 teams. They play for eight weeks during the summer. (BRYAN THOMAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Behind Lincoln Center, at the heart of a semicircle of tall brick buildings with a dome of leafy trees, on the dull playground of the Amsterdam Houses, the basketball league playoffs were underway.
Youth basketball has been a tradition in this public space on the Upper West Side since at least the 1960s, when Samuel N. Bennerson II, whose name is engraved on a sign along the iron gate, created the Betterment League. The leagues that followed continued to voice their mission in their names: the Brotherhood on Urban Survival in the 1970s; Amsterdam Action in the 1980s; and Positive Influence Basketball, which the league’s commissioner and game commentator, Andrew Blacks, founded nearly a decade ago. Summer is the only time the league gets to play; its teams are essentially shut out of playing a winter season. The indoor basketball courts of nearby schools, Mr. Blacks said, have been booked up by adult leagues.
Most of the playground’s swings are gone. So is the sandbox, and the chess and checkers tables. The small jungle gyms, layered in paint, are chipped and rusted. Programs for teenagers at the Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center across the street dried up years ago.
But none of that mattered on a beautifully mild summer night as spectators hung by the fence. Others watched from cloth folding chairs on the sidewalk or courtside benches, including Rose Daise, a gray-haired woman known as Miss Rose. As legend has it, she has never missed a league game. “It’s my entertainment,” she said. “It’s good to see them doing something.”
Andrew Blacks, 38, grew up in the Amsterdam Houses. He founded the Positive Influence league nearly a decade ago. (BRYAN THOMAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
The Brooklyn-based Turbo Squadron, in blue, played Castle Athletics from Harlem, in red; both were 3-2. One team’s season would end that night.
“Oh, baby,” Mr. Blacks yelled as the ball sailed out of bounds. Four minutes 10 seconds remained in the two-point game. “Let’s get back at it,” he shouted, pacing the sideline.
Success for the league is measured outside of points. It is in the stacks of college acceptance letters; the teenagers who help keep the game books; the 14-and-under home team, the Amsterdam Sonics, who once brought back a Rucker Park championship, a high honor in playground basketball; peer mentoring; and the young men who show up from as far away as Albany with fresh confidence. The night before, with his team down by 15, a 19-year-old shooting guard from Harlem took over the game and scored 42 points to lead his teammates into the playoffs.
“I always tell them,” Mr. Blacks said of his players as he set up before the game last week, “ ‘It’s not about your last play. It’s about your next play.’ ”
The season ended last Friday with an awards ceremony on the court. Mr. Blacks handed out navy blue Nike sweatsuits and book bags adorned with the Positive Influence Basketball league logo to the top two teams.
The league will not return until next summer. During that time, some of the players will scatter, Mr. Blacks said, some of them for good. The league used to run winter games in the gyms of nearby Martin Luther King Jr. Education Campus and Public School 191, Mr. Blacks said. But in recent years, he said, those courts have continuously been booked by private adult leagues.
“The neighborhood was changing,” Mr. Blacks said, “but they were forgetting the youth here. They got more money than us, but we’re still here.”
Mr. Blacks, 38, is short and stocky, with an easy grin. He grew up in the Amsterdam Houses playing point guard in the Amsterdam Action Association and in the Public Schools Athletic League. Most people in the community know him as Peach, a nickname given to him as a boy by his aunt, he said, for the roundness of his head. He tours the world as a member of the production crew with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a field, he noted, that he entered through a relationship he formed on the basketball court.
Edmon Archer, 68, founded a league at the Amsterdam Houses playground in the late 1970s. He coaches a team for the Positive Influence league. (BRYAN THOMAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
One summer, when Mr. Blacks returned home from college, he found that the league had ended and that the playground “was going to waste.”
He started the Positive Influence Basketball league with about 60 children from the Amsterdam Houses. The league has been funded through donations like backboards and rims from Spalding, coaches’ fees, fund-raisers, grants, offerings such as ice from a nearby grocery store and his own money.
The league now has more than 800 players on 68 teams. They play for eight weeks during the summer in six divisions that include elementary school students, high schoolers and college students. Most are teenagers from Manhattan, but they also come from the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.
Mr. Blacks has watched many of them grow up. “They’re not my kids legally,” he said, “but these are my kids.” He added, “The main thing in this league is confidence and hope.”
This past season, the Positive Influence league had to cancel at least eight games because of rain. And in recent years, Mr. Blacks said, he has turned away hundreds of youths because he does not have enough court space.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Education Campus one recent evening, in an adult league, a team from a finance company in Manhattan played basketball against a pickup squad of solo players, organized by the Fastbreak NYC sports league.
Macy’s is coughing up $650,000 to settle accusations of racial profiling against its store in New York City’s Herald Square, the Associated Press reports.
The retail giant signed on to an agreement on Tuesday with the attorney general of New York. Macy’s agrees to adopt new policies against profiling, train its employees, treat customer complaints seriously and better record any detentions made, the newswire reports.
Macy’s is also required to post a “customer’s bill of rights” in English and Spanish in all of its stores in the state as well as on its website.
“It is absolutely unacceptable—and it’s illegal—for anyone in New York to be treated like a criminal simply because of the color of their skin,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in light of the settlement.
According to AP, the investigation into the store’s treatments of its customers of color began in February 2013, following several complaints from black and Latino customers, among others. Some of the complaints dated back as far as 2007, detailing customers’ claims they were detained at the stores even though they had not stolen or tried to steal anything.
Some customers who were not fluent in English were not allowed to make phone calls, were denied an interpreter and were made to sign trespass notices that they did not understand, AP notes.
“To be clear, our company’s policies strictly prohibit any form of discrimination or racial profiling, and any occurrence of such behavior will not be tolerated in our organization,” Macy’s reiterated in its own statement. “Moving forward, our company will be initiating a series of measures including enhanced training and education for our loss prevention and sales associates. We also will be adopting an expanded role for our security monitor to help ensure that we have the right policies and procedures in place, and that we are constantly reviewing our compliance with them.”
This news comes shortly after luxury retailer Barneys New York agreed to a settlement, this time for $525,000, to deal with its own accusations of racial profiling.
New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dismantles some long held myths about teen sexuality. The birthrate for teens in the United States hit an all-time low in 2013.
The government agency reports 277,749 babies were born in 2013 to mothers who were under the age of 20. That is the lowest number recorded since the CDC began collecting birthrate data in 1940. Between 1991 and 2012, the rate for Non-hispanic Black teens saw the largest decline of 63%, and birthrates were down in all 50 states.
According to the CDC, this is the result of “a number of behavioral changes, including decreased sexual activity, increases in the use of contraception at first sex and at most recent sex, and the adoption and increased use of hormonal contraception, injectables, and intrauterine devices.”
Among Black teenagers, birth rates fell less than 20% from 2007 to 2012 in the District of Columbia and Michigan, while rates in 13 states fell at least 35%.
In 2012, non-Hispanic black and Hispanic teen birth rates were still more than two times higher than the rate for non-Hispanic white teens, but despite widely held beliefs about black women’s reproduction, Black teens do not, in fact, have the highest birth rate in the country. So the next time anyone tries to point the finger at Black women celebrities for encouraging teen sex, like Bill O’Reilly did in April, their handwringing can be easily refuted with CDC data.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock, CDC
Source: CDC article via forharriet.com
Although the U.S. Supreme Court was “once a leader in the world” in the battle for racial equality, recent decisions by the high court undermine its role in solving a “real racial problem” in America, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in an interview with The National Law Journal last Wednesday.
