On April 16th, the White House announced that Deesha Dyer, 37, would become the Obama administration’s third social secretary, and second African-American woman in history to hold the esteemed position.
Dyer, who is a native of Philadelphia, first came to the White House in 2009 as an intern in the Office of Scheduling and Advance. She was hired full-time in 2010 for the role of associate director for Scheduling Correspondence and was later promoted to deputy director and hotel program director. In this role, Dyer traveled with the President and First Lady and worked on matters pertaining to press, lodging and site logistics. In 2013, she was promoted to her current role as director and deputy social secretary.
“Deesha shares our commitment to a White House that reflects America’s history, highlights our culture, and celebrates all Americans. Michelle and I look forward to working with her in this new role as we welcome visitors from across the country and around the world to the People’s House,” said President Obama in a statement.
Prior to starting her career at the White House, Dyer worked at Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust from 2001 to 2010. From 2003 to 2010, she also worked as a freelance journalist covering hip-hop for several different media outlets including The Philadelphia Citypaper. In addition to her years of work experience, the Philadelphia native has also served in several community advocacy roles including her work with young adults at the Youth Health Empowerment Project, her role as creator of a hip-hop AIDS program based in Philadelphia and as a CARE advocacy volunteer and board member at Action AIDS. Since moving to that nation’s capital, Dyer has also volunteered with the homeless community in Washington, D.C. and served as a mentor in the First Lady’s mentee program.
First Lady Michelle Obama congratulated Dyer on her new position and said in a statement that she has always been impressed by her work and is “thrilled that she has agreed to continue her service as [their] Social Secretary.”
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The city of Chicago yesterday agreed to a $5.5 million reparations fund for the mainly African-American male victims of police torture under former and disgraced police commander Jon Burge. The proposed fund includes free city college tuition and counseling for at least 50 victims and their families, the Chicago Tribune reports. The long-sought reparations fund is widely being seen as the city’s effort to end the decades-long scandal that first came to light in the early 1990s.
Current inmates are filing lawsuits or alleging that their confessions had been elicited under torture. At least 20 additional cases, all alleging to have been Burge’s victims, have been identified.
Learn more about the proposed reparations plan in The Chicago Tribune.
Current inmates are filing lawsuits or alleging that their confessions had been elicited under torture. At least 20 additional cases, all alleging to have been Burge’s victims, have been identified.
Learn more about the proposed reparations plan in The Chicago Tribune.
Grammy and Academy Award-winning singer John Legend has launched a campaign to end mass incarceration by announcing today the multiyear initiative, FREE AMERICA. He will visit and perform at a correctional facility on Thursday in Austin, Texas, where he also will be part of a press conference with state legislators to discuss Texas’ criminal justice system.
“We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country,” Legend said in an interview. “It’s destroying families, it’s destroying communities and we’re the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration.”
Legend, 36, will also visit a California state prison and co-host a criminal justice event with Politico in Washington, D.C., later this month. The campaign will include help from other artists — to be announced — and organizations committed to ending mass incarceration.
“I’m just trying to create some more awareness to this issue and trying to make some real change legislatively,” he said. “And we’re not the only ones. There are senators that are looking at this, like Rand Paul and Cory Booker, there are other nonprofits that are looking at this, and I just wanted to add my voice to that.”
Jeralean Talley of Inkster, MI tops a list maintained by the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group, which tracks the world’s longest-living people. Gertrude Weaver, a 116-year-old Arkansas woman who was the oldest documented person for a few days, died on Monday.
Talley was born May 23, 1899. Asked for her key to longevity, the Detroit Free Press reports that she echoed previous answers on the topic.
“It’s coming from above,” she told the newspaper. “That’s the best advice I can give you. It’s not in my hands or your hands.”
Michael Kinloch, 56, of Wayne County’s Canton Township, is a General Motors engineer and longtime family friend of Talley’s through their church. He said Talley’s mental state is “is very sharp.”
“It’s unfortunate that other people passed away, but this has certainly elevated her. She’s feeling no pain. She just can’t get around like she used to,” Kinloch said.
Talley’s husband died in 1988 and five generations of her family have lived in the Detroit area. In 2013, her 114th birthday drew the attention of President Barack Obama, who said in a personal note that she’s “part of an extraordinary generation.”
Kinloch said he’s looking forward to taking Talley, despite her advanced age, on their annual fishing trip.
“We go to a trout pond in Dexter,” a community about 40 miles west of Detroit, Kinloch said. “She really likes that.”
article by Associated Press via abcnews.go.com
Talley was born May 23, 1899. Asked for her key to longevity, the Detroit Free Press reports that she echoed previous answers on the topic.
“It’s coming from above,” she told the newspaper. “That’s the best advice I can give you. It’s not in my hands or your hands.”
Michael Kinloch, 56, of Wayne County’s Canton Township, is a General Motors engineer and longtime family friend of Talley’s through their church. He said Talley’s mental state is “is very sharp.”
“It’s unfortunate that other people passed away, but this has certainly elevated her. She’s feeling no pain. She just can’t get around like she used to,” Kinloch said.
Talley’s husband died in 1988 and five generations of her family have lived in the Detroit area. In 2013, her 114th birthday drew the attention of President Barack Obama, who said in a personal note that she’s “part of an extraordinary generation.”
Kinloch said he’s looking forward to taking Talley, despite her advanced age, on their annual fishing trip.
“We go to a trout pond in Dexter,” a community about 40 miles west of Detroit, Kinloch said. “She really likes that.”
article by Associated Press via abcnews.go.com
History will be made at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater on the evening of Thursday, April 9, when Misty Copeland, a soloist with the American Ballet Theatre, joins Brooklyn Mack of the Washington Ballet in a performance of Swan Lake. Copeland and Mack, both African American, will go where no dancers of color have gone before. They will become the first African Americans to dance the leading roles of Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried respectively in the traditional ballet.
There should be little doubt that Copeland—a rising star at the American Ballet Theater who gained notoriety after appearing in a widely noticed Under Armour advertising campaign—and Mack—trained at Washington’s Kirov Academy of Ballet and Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet—have demonstrated ample talent on ballet stages around the world. Their appearance as leads in Swan Lake would be seen merely as appropriate next steps in their expanding careers if they were white.
Their success should remind all Washingtonians of the pioneering role that D.C. has played in promoting African-American dance. As dance historian Tamara Brown has noted, the juxtaposition of academic training at Howard University and the numerous popular theaters along U Street nurtured a creative center for African-American dance during much of the 20th century. Howard University’s Maryrose Reeves Allen stood at the heart of this energetic scene.
Allen, who was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1899, earned her college degree at the Sargent School in Massachusetts before teaching summer school at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, then the country’s leading center for the study of African dance. She joined the Howard faculty in 1925 as the director of a new physical education program for women.
Allen’s arrival coincided with the heyday of the Howard University Players under the leadership of T. Montgomery Gregory and Alain Locke. Two years after coming to the Howard campus, Allen established a group that would grow to become the Howard University Dance Ensemble, one of the era’s most inspired African-American companies.
Allen’s dancers penetrated the world of white concert dance by the 1950s, performing with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington and on many integrated stages in New York City. Her students—including Debbie Allen, Chuck Davis, Melvin Deal, Ulysses Dove and George Faison—populated major classical and modern dance companies throughout the U.S., from Broadway stages to Hollywood studios. They nurtured a lively dance scene in Washington that spawned the Capitol Ballet and professional companies associated with the Black Arts Movement during the 1960s and 1970s.
Maryrose Reeves Allen remained active in the Howard University and dance communities after her retirement in 1967. In 1991, one year before Allen’s death, Howard became the first historically black university to offer a degree in dance through its Department of Theatre Arts. Her spirit will be very much present at the Kennedy Center as Copeland and Mack step center stage.
At a time when tens of thousands of American students are getting turned away from their first, second and even third college picks, Harold Ekeh, of Long Island, N.Y., has an enviable quandary: deciding which of the eight Ivy League colleges he will attend next year, according to CBS New York.
For all his hard work and accomplishments, the Elmont High School salutatorian was no less surprised when the acceptance letters arrived.
“Absolutely shocked,” Ekeh tells the television news station about the acceptances. “It was as though I was hit repeatedly. I was stunned.”
Ekeh, whose family immigrated to the city eight years ago from Nigeria, tells the station that he credits his academic success with his family’s humble beginnings, thirst for education and a strong desire to make a meaningful mark on society.
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“I am just thanking god for what he is doing for my family in the life of my son,” Harold’s mother Roseline told CBS News. She works for a human resources agency in Queens, N.Y., while his father Paul works in the traffic division of the New York Police Department.
“I am overwhelmed,” Paul tells the news outlet. “To say that I am proud is not enough, it is awesome.”
Although Ekeh spent most of his high school years focused on complicated biochemistry experiments, he volunteered on social justice campaigns, served as a mentor and participated in sports. He was also elected to Elmont’s homecoming court and honor society.
“Kids would say, ‘I want to be a firefighter or a police officer or a superhero.’ I would say I want to explore the human body, what makes us who we are,” he said, “I would like to be a neurosurgeon when I grow up.”
As for which school he’ll pick, he leaning toward Yale, but plans to visit the other schools in upcoming weeks.
“I am very humbled by this,” he said. “I see this as not an accomplishment for me, but as an accomplishment for my school, my community. Because I really see this as my mission to inspire the next generation.”
Visitors to the United Nations headquarters in New York will get a powerful reminder of the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade and its enormous impact on world history through a visually stunning new memorial that was unveiled last week in a solemn ceremony.
There were speeches intended to touch the emotionality of a system that operated for hundreds of years, killing an estimated 15 million African men, women and children and sending millions more into the jaws of a vicious system of plantation slavery in the Americas.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called slavery “a stain on human history.”
U.N. General Assembly President Sam Kutesa said slavery remained one of the “darkest and most abhorrent chapters” in world history.
It was only fitting that the ceremony take place at a site surrounded by the looming skyscrapers of New York. Slavery was the economic engine upon which American capitalism was built, providing the seed money for United States businesses to create the most vibrant economic system in the world. The enslaved Black person (whose gender is purposely vague to represent men, women and children) lying inside the dramatically shaped marble memorial, which is called The Ark of Return, is a symbol of the millions whose deaths led to the building of those skyscrapers, the visual emblems of American capitalism’s enormous financial windfall for the white beneficiaries of slavery and their descendants.
During his speech unveiling the memorial, Ban Ki-moon spoke directly to Black people in the Americas and the Caribbean who are descended from the enslaved Black people who were sacrificed.
Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Thursday said that the Rev. Leah D. Daughtry will serve as chief executive officer of the Democratic National Convention Committee in 2016.
Daughtry, 52, who splits time between Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, New York, served in the position in 2008 in Denver, Colorado, when Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president of the United States.
“We are thrilled to have Leah Daughtry return to lead our convention team. She will bring so much expertise and enthusiasm to this important event,” Wasserman Schultz said in a prepared statement.
Daughter of activist and pastor the Rev. Herbert Daughtry of the House of the Lord Church, Daughtry works as a minister herself in Washington.
She also has strong roots in the Democratic Party, holding various senior posts at the United States Department of Labor during the Clinton administration, including senior advisor to the secretary, chief of staff, and lastly, acting assistant secretary for Administration and Management, with oversight for the development of the Department’s management programs and policies, including responsibility for the Department’s $35 billion budget, according to a bio at Harvard University Institute of Politics, where she served as a fellow in 2009.
Anthony Ray Hinton walked out of prison a free man Friday after nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row. He stepped into the sunshine, praised God and thanked his lawyers, according to CNN.
Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Laura Petro on Thursday dismissed the case against the 58-year-old man. One day earlier, prosecutors told the judge that they couldn’t link the bullets from the crime scene to Hinton, who always asserted his innocence in the 1985 murders of two men.
“All they had to do was to test the gun,” Hinton exclaimed to reporters, “but when you think you’re high and mighty and you’re above the law, you don’t have to answer to nobody.”
Hinton’s attorneys had long said that their client was another wrongfully convicted black man who faced a death sentence.
“Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice,” said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Rights Initiative and Hinton’s lead attorney, according to CNN. “I can’t think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton.”
Prosecutors won a conviction even though there were no eyewitnesses, fingerprints or other physical evidence linking Hinton to the murder of two restaurant workers during a robbery.
Bullets at the crime scene had questionable links to a gun found in Hinton’s home. But tests raised doubts about whether the bullets were fired from that gun and, in fact, whether they were all fired from the same weapon.
Deval L. Patrick, who recently concluded two terms as the 71st governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, will be the principal speaker at the Afternoon Exercises of Harvard’s 364th Commencement on May 28.
“Deval Patrick is an extraordinarily distinguished alumnus, a deeply dedicated public servant, and an inspiring embodiment of the American dream,” said Harvard University President Drew Faust. “We greatly look forward to welcoming him home to Harvard on Commencement Day.”
Raised on Chicago’s South Side, Patrick came to Massachusetts at age 14, having won a scholarship to Milton Academy through the Boston-based organization A Better Chance. He earned admission to Harvard College, as the first in his family to attend college, and spent a year in Africa after graduation on a Rockefeller Fellowship before studying for his law degree at Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.
Early in his career, he served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles, as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund working on voting rights and death-penalty cases, and then as a partner at the Boston law firm Hill & Barlow.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton named him assistant attorney general for civil rights, the nation’s top civil rights post. In that role, he led the Justice Department’s efforts in such areas as prosecuting hate crimes and enforcing laws on employment discrimination, fair lending, and rights for the disabled.