The site reports that this is the second such award for the college in the last two years and the money will be used to launch seminar-styled education sessions on campus, with a focus on substance abuse prevention among college-age youth to prevent risky sexual behaviors.
The grant is reportedly part of a national initiative launched by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration targeting HBCUs as service delivery partners in vulnerable areas.
Morris Brown, founded in 1816 as one of only a few historically black colleges and universities founded by African Americans, has served as a lead institution in the program since 2014 to help improve public health outcomes among youth in Fulton and Dekalb Counties.
Greater Atlanta has alarming rates of HIV infections and the state of Georgia ranks second among U.S. states in the rate of new HIV diagnoses. Only 73 percent of the people in the Atlanta metro area who have HIV know it, because not enough people are getting tested for the virus. (The national average is 87 percent.)
The program at Morris Brown hopes to reach more than 400 participants by 2017.
Kim Hunter Reed (photo via twitter.com) article via jbhe.com
Kim Hunter Reed has been appointed by President Barack Obama as Deputy Under Secretary of Education. Dr. Reed will be a member of the senior leadership team at the Department of Education that oversees higher education in the United States.
Dr. Reed is the former chief of staff for the Louisiana Board of Regents and the former executive vice president of the University of Louisiana System. Earlier, she served on the faculty at Southern University in Baton Rouge and was executive assistant to the president and interim vice president of student affairs at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.
Dr. Reed earned a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalist and master of public administration degree at Southeastern Louisiana University. She holds a doctorate in public policy from Southern University.
All eight Ivy League schools — Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, University of Pennsylvania — have offered Long Island, New York high school senior Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna places in their freshman class.
In addition to the Ivies, she was accepted by Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Augusta is valedictorian at Elmont Memorial High School, where she has a 101.64 weighted grade point average. The school is no stranger to academic superstars: Last year, senior Harold Ekeh scored the same number of Ivy acceptances.
“I am elated, but most importantly, I am thankful,” Augusta, 17, told school officials at Sewanhaka Central High School District.
Augusta’s older brother Johnson told NBC News that Augusta’s “initiative and perseverance,” as well as the family’s emphasis on learning, were responsible for his sister’s success. And the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as both their Nigerian-born parents are college-educated, and her father has a master’s and doctorate from the University of Indianapolis.
“Education is very paramount in our family,” said her brother, who also made his way to the Ivies. He is a freshman at Cornell University, studying biological engineering.
Tobias and Basillia Nna immigrated to the United States in 1994 and settled first in Indiana then New York City. They moved to Elmont in 2000. Their father has worked for various companies as a physical therapist. All four of their children were born in this country. “Augusta’s school days start from 7 in the morning until around 8 at night,” said Uwamanzu-Nna. “Not to mention all of the homework assignments, scholarship and other miscellaneous things she gets done.”
He said that while his sister was co-founder of her own tutoring service, she also works at another tutoring center on Saturdays.
“I am humbled by all of the college acceptance letters that I recently received,” Augusta says on her high school website. “I am reminded that I have a responsibility to be a role model for others and use my experiences to encourage and inspire others, especially young women.” To read more, go to: http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/college-game-plan/long-island-high-school-student-accepted-all-eight-ivies-n551901?cid=sm_tw&hootPostID=9c3ca1968651804b658563b28ec6dd2c
Malawi Chief Theresa Kachindomoto (photo by Hannah McNeish via aljazeera.com)
“Educate a girl and you educate the whole area … You educate the world.” – Theresa Kachindomoto
article by Hadassah Egbedi via venturesafrica.com
In 2003, when Theresa Kachindomoto was called upon to leave her job of 27 years as a secretary at a city college to become a village chief in Malawi, she refused. “I said ‘No, I don’t want to be a chief,’ she told writer Hannah McNeishfor AlJazeera, but the royal family insisted, asking her to pack her bags and head home to assume her position as the senior chief of Dedza district around Lake Malawi.
In obedience, the mother of five packed up and headed home to Dezda, little did she know that she would be an agent of great change in the district of over 100,000 people. Days after she arrived, Theresa was shocked to see female children as young as 12 with a husband, and children of their own.
Malawi ranks 8th out of 20 countries with the highest child-marriage rates in the world. According to a United Nations survey, more than half of Malawi’s girls are married before the age of 18. This comes as no surprise as the country only recently, in 2015, passed a legislation which changed the legal marriage age from 15 to 18 years.
Theresa immediately called for an end to child marriage, the termination of these existing marriages, and for parents to give their female children an education instead, but no one listened. Most parents said they were too poor to keep a female child, or send her to school, as it will make them poorer. A number of them felt Theresa had no right to change this tradition, especially as a mother of five boys. If you can’t change them, change the law
Since she could not change their set mentality, Theresa opted to change the law instead. She met with 50 sub chiefs and made them sign an agreement to end child marriage under customary law, and to annul existing unions. “I said to the chiefs that this must stop, or I will dismiss them.” Four chiefs who did not adhere to the new law got dismissed for still allowing child marriage in their areas of jurisdiction. But seeing that Theresa meant business, they ensured that existing child marriages were terminated in their areas, this action got their positions reinstated.
The issue of child marriage is not just a Malawian problem, it is one that has long existed in many African countries, and including Nigeria which is one of the countries in Africa with the highest rate of child marriage, particularly in the North. Statistics show that Africa has 15 out of the 20 countries in the world with the highest rates of child marriage. And according to predictions from UNICEF, the number of child brides will double by 2050 if the current trend continues. The problems that accompany child marriages are numerous including STD’s, Vesicovaginal Fistula (VVF), and death.
In Malawi, there are certain appalling traditions that encourage child marriage and subject young girls to sexual abuse. Girls from as young as age seven are sent to “Kusasa fumbi – cleansing – camps”, a camp to prepare girls for womanhood and marriage. Here, they are taught how to please men by performing titillating dances and sex acts. Some end up leaving camp disvirgined by the teacher(s); those who are not, end up being defiled anyway by men hired by their parents to take their virginity and, or impregnate them. There is also a belief that sick men can cure themselves by having sex with virgins.
In the past three years, Chief Theresa has terminated more than 850 child unions, including putting an end to sexually abusive traditions, and sending these young girls to school. Most times, she funds their education, and sometimes she gets sponsors to do so. She also has a large network of village head, men and women who’s helping her enforce these laws. Some to ensure that the girls placed in school are not pulled out. To read full article, go to: http://venturesafrica.com/how-a-malawi-female-chief-is-effectively-ending-child-marriages-and-sexual-initiations/
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, D-Bronx, speaks during a news conference on Feb. 2, 2016. (Photo: MIKE GROLL/AP) article by Kenneth Lovett via nydailynews.com
New York has become the first state to enact a program touted by President Obama to help at-risk black and Hispanic boys and young men, state officials said.
Known as “My Brother’s Keeper,” the program is designed to keep young males of color out of prison by focusing on family and community engagement, professional development and new school practices aimed at improving outcomes. Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature included $20 million in the state budget enacted last week to create a state version of the program. “I was born and raised in the Bronx and I have seen firsthand the challenges that so many boys and young men of color face every day,” Carl Heastie, New York’s first black Assembly speaker, told the Daily News.
Heastie said studies show that black and Hispanic males are more likely to drop out of high school and “become trapped in the revolving door of the criminal justice system.”
“We need to change the conversation around the achievement rates of African-American and Latino men so that successful futures become the rule and not the exception,” he said. “With this funding we are taking some meaningful steps toward a more holistic and comprehensive approach to improving the prospects of all our children, especially those who need our support the most.”
Obama, who has talked about his first job scooping ice cream, created a My Brother’s Keeper task force in 2014, with the idea of targeting minority boys so they can read at grade level by third grade, complete college education or training, and enter the workforce more prepared. It also seeks to reduce violence. To read more, go to: http://m.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-enact-obama-brother-keeper-program-article-1.2587149?cid=bitly
article by Shenequa Golding via vibe.com
While hip-hop still comes to terms with the death of Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor, surviving members from A Tribe Called Quest announced Sunday (April 3) a memorial would be held in honor of their late lyrical brother.
“Please meet us at St. Albans Park in Queens, NY on April 4th at 10:30am,” Organizers wrote. “The first 200 fans to arrive will receive something very special!”
As Q-Tip famously once said “Back in the day on the boulevard of Linden” both Tip and Phife Dawg grew up in the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens. Since Phife’s death on March 22nd, fans of the funky diabetic have made efforts to rename a street and park where he along with Q-Tip would often go and freestyle.
If you’re planning to attend, please arrive early because all of Queens and hip-hop will be sure to show love to the Five Footer.
John Edgar Wideman (photo via abpspeakers.com) article via jbhe.com
The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1904 as a highly selective group of 50 members within a larger organization called the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Over the years the two groups functioned separately with different memberships, budgets, and boards of directors. In 1993 the two groups finally agreed to form a single group of 250 members under the name of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Members are chosen from the fields of literature, music, and the fine arts. Members must be native or naturalized citizens of the United States. They are elected for life and pay no dues. New members are elected only upon the death of other members.
This year 12 new members were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One of the 12 new members is John Edgar Wideman.
Wideman is the Asa Messer Professor and professor of Africana studies and literary arts at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Before joining the faculty at Brown, Professor Wideman was a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Professor Wideman grew up in Pittsburgh and then enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania where he was an all-Ivy League basketball player. His senior year at Penn, Wideman was named a Rhodes Scholar, the first African American to win the honor in over a half century.
After returning from Oxford, Wideman graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Professor Wideman is the author of numerous novels, short story collections, and memoirs including Brothers and Keepers (Henry Holt, 1984) and Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (Pantheon, 1994).
Oberlin College in Ohio has received an archive of documents relating to Mary Church Terrell.
The papers were donated by Raymond and Jean Langston, the current occupant of the home in Highland Beach, Maryland, where Terrell died. The collection includes documents, letters, diaries, photographs and other artifacts, some dating to the 1890s and earlier.
Mary Church Terrell was the daughter of former slaves. She was a 1884 graduate of Oberlin College and went on to become a teacher and principal of M Street Colored High School, now known as Dunbar High School.
Terrell was the founding president of the National Association of Colored Women and was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Terrell was the first African American woman to serve on the Washington, D.C. Board of Education.
In 1949, Terrell, then in her 80s, was refused service at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. She filed suit and in a case eventually decided by the Supreme Court, racial segregation of restaurants in the nation’s capital was ruled unconstitutional.
Mary Church Terrell died on July 24, 1954 at the age of 90.
In this Aug. 9, 2006 photo, Miami police officer Delrish Moss, helps David Jenkins into the van taking the family to Disney in Miami. (Al Diaz/The Miami Herald via AP)
FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — A veteran Miami police officer with two decades of experience dealing with the media and community leaders will take over as police chief in Ferguson, hoping to help the St. Louis suburb heal as it rebounds after the fatal 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown.
Miami Police Maj. Delrish Moss was announced as chief Thursday, putting a black man in charge of a mostly white department that serves a town where African-Americans make up two-thirds of the residents.
“This has been a long and strenuous process, but we believe Major Moss is the right choice,” Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III said in a statement. “We understand the past 18 months have not been easy for everyone, but the City is now moving forward and we are excited to have Major Moss lead our police department.”
The 18-year-old Brown, who was black and unarmed, was fatally shot by white officer Darren Wilson during a street confrontation on Aug. 9, 2014. The shooting prompted months of unrest that sometimes grew violent and helped spark the national Black Lives Matter movement.
A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to indict Wilson, who resigned in November 2014. But the Justice Department issued a critical report of Ferguson in March 2015, citing racial bias in policing and a municipal court system that made money at poor and minority residents’ expense.
Ferguson’s city manager, municipal judge and Police Chief Tom Jackson all resigned within days of the report. The Ferguson City Council just two weeks ago agreed to a settlement with the Justice Department that calls for major reforms in the city’s criminal justice system.
