In 2008, Aaron Cheney demonstrates outside the federal courthouse where former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was attending a hearing on charges he obstructed justice and committed perjury for lying while under oath during a 2003 civil trial about decades-old Chicago police torture allegations in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
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.
John Legend at Atlanta’s Chastain Park Amphitheatre in 2014. (Photo by Robb D. Cohen/Invision/AP)
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.”
Comedian Kevin Hart has teamed up with the United Negro College Fund to award four Philadelphia high school seniors $50,000 scholarships for their stellar academic performance.
Hart selected the students himself as a way to reward them for their high GPA’s and to alleviate some of the financial stress that a college education can cause.
“This is me stepping up to the plate and saying what you’re doing is dope,” Philly.com reports Hart saying. “You’re dope. You’ve got the opportunity to be the dopest of all dopetivity.”
The Philadelphia native posted a message on his Instagram Saturday congratulating the young scholars saying, “I love my city and I will continue to put on for my city…Congrats to the 4 seniors that I chose. Now go be great!!!!”
This isn’t the first time Hart has used his celebrity wealth and platform to give back to the next generation of young leaders. Last year, the funnyman donated $50,000 to Texas Southern University’s band after hearing that the Tom Joyner Foundation was raising money to help the band see TSU alumnus Michael Strahan inducted into the Football Hall of Fame.
The four winners of Hart’s scholarship will also be flown to Atlanta for the UNCF’s “An Evening of Stars” event hosted by Black-ish star Anthony Anderson. The show will air on BET April 26. article by Courtney Connley via blackenterprise.com
Betti Wiggins (Photo courtesy of Excellent Schools Detroit and Detroit Metro Parent)
With a focus on healthier foods and local farms, Betti Wiggins has led Detroit’s kids through a food revolution.
In the past four years, school meals in Detroit have been transformed. Gone are the chicken nuggets and sugary drinks. Now school cafeterias serve fresh fruit and mixed baby green salads, lean meat, low-fat milk, and whole grain breads. Better yet, some even serve produce from school gardens and local farmers.
The change hasn’t occurred overnight. The Detroit Public Schools Office of School Nutrition, which serves breakfast and lunch to more than 55,000 kids in 141 schools, has worked hard to create such a dramatic nutritional turnaround. And much of the credit goes to the office’s executive director, Betti Wiggins.
In 2008, Detroit Public Schools (DPS) was outsourcing its food service program. But the staff union had the foresight to hire Wiggins to propose bringing it back in-house. Her background as chief of nutrition for the District of Columbia and as a food services director in three other states, came in handy, and the district was convinced she was the one to turn things around.
Right off the bat Wiggins did away with the outside food management company, which allowed her to more than double the size of the food budget. (Before Wiggins came on board, DPS was spending 23 percent of its budget on food; it’s now 51 percent). The change in the quality was dramatic.
“One of the first things we did was turn the deep fryers off,” Wiggins says. “There are certain foods I don’t think we should be serving in schools. I don’t serve hot dogs and corn dogs; I think that’s carnival food.”
Next she increased the servings of fresh fruits and vegetables. Once a week the students are introduced to a new raw vegetable. If they don’t like the jicama, sugar snap peas, or asparagus the first time, it doesn’t matter. As long as Wiggins continues to put new food on their plates, the kids will eventually eat them. Since 2009, the students have also been eating brown rice and enjoying Meatless Mondays with hummus, eggs or cheese.
Munira Khalif faces a tough decision: she has been accepted to all eight Ivy League schools, plus Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Minnesota.
According to Mounds Park Academy, the high school senior has stellar grades and an extremely high ACT score in addition to being a state speech champion and founder of MPA’s Social Consciousness Club. She has also campaigned for education, especially in East Africa and especially for girls there.
“Munira has thrived in MPA’s rigorous educational environment, where we challenge students to be intellectually curious and confident communicators,” said Randy Comfort, MPA’s upper school director. “She already is making a difference in communities across the globe, and I know she is ready to embrace the challenges that arise in our constantly changing world.” RELATED:New York Student Harold Ekeh Accepted at All 8 Ivy League Schools
Khalif has not yet made a decision, and she intends to tour a few campuses before the decision deadline of May 1. Once she decides, she knows she wants to major in political science and be a force for good in the world. “I was very surprised. The best part for me was being able to call family members on the phone and to hear their excitement,” said Khalilf. “This was truly a blessing from God. To me this news is reflective of the support and encouragement of my family, my school and my community.” article via thegrio.com
Jeralean Talley is escorted down the aisle after the church service honoring her 115th birthday at the New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church in Inkster, Michigan May 25, 2014. (PHOTO: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
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
Frederick Hutson founded the company Pigeonly to help tailor technological products and services for underserved communities, such as the incarcerated and their families. | Pigeon.ly
Frederick Hutson was just 24 and living in St. Petersburg, Florida, when he was convicted on a drug trafficking charge. The Air Force veteran spent four years behind bars, serving out his sentence in eight different correctional facilities.
Hutson found prison life was isolating, no surprise at a time when one 15-minute interstate phone call could cost an inmate as much as $17. Isolation is an ongoing hurdle for prisoners and their families, as research has repeatedly shown that keeping inmates connected with loved ones and support structures on the outside helps reduce recidivism rates.
“[Incarcerated] people who maintain supportive relationships with family members have better outcomes — such as stable housing and employment — when they return to the community,” reads one study by the nonprofit Vera Institute. “Many corrections practitioners and policy makers intuitively understand the positive role families can play in the reentry process, but they often do not know how to help people in prison draw on these social supports.”
Such research, coupled with his own experience, gave Hutson a new idea. Today, that idea has transformed into Pigeonly, a $3 million tech company specifically tailoring products for underserved communities, particularly the incarcerated and their families.
Hutson launched Pigeonly in 2013 after receiving coaching and input from the NewME Accelerator in San Francisco, which helps support underrepresented entrepreneurs. Pigeonly’s products to date include Fotopigeon, a prison-friendly photo-mailing platform, and Telepigeon, a service that drastically reduces the often cost-prohibitive price of phone calls to and from correctional facilities.
“Most people don’t have life sentences, so the real question we have to ask ourselves is, what type of person do we want to release?” Hudson, now 31, told The Huffington Post. “Someone who’s isolated from everyone they know and lost touch with everyone who could support them who, when they’re back on the street, are way more likely to go back to the previous activity they were doing before prison? No.” Inside Pigeonly’s office in Las Vegas. The company recently expanded into a larger space to accommodate its growth. (Pigeon.ly)
The Las Vegas-based company says it has already had a great deal of success with its flagship products in a relatively short period of time.
Fotopigeon prints photos uploaded by a user and mails them to a prison on the user’s behalf, carefully abiding by the strident and sometimes confusing regulations that govern mail sent to prisons. The service already has a base of 80,000 customers who have uploaded over a million photos, at 50 cents apiece with free shipping, since the service began.
Hutson told HuffPost the company is currently shipping a quarter of a million photos a month.
“It’s something that has very high value when you’re isolated from everything you know,” Hutson said. “Think about how important images are in daily life on the outside. It’s crazy to think it’d be any different for the 2.3 million people in prison or the 20 million people who want to communicate with them.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s notebooks are on display at the Brooklyn Museum. (Credit: Tseng Kwong Chi/Muna Tseng Dance Projects)
As a child, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum, which he used to visit with his mother and where he got a globalist view of art history that would provide fuel for his own later painting. He’s back at the museum now, part of that global history, in “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks.”
Prima Ballerina Misty Copeland (Photo: hellogiggles.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.
Ballet dancer Brooklyn Mack (Photo: ballet.co.uk)
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.
New York High School student Harold Ekeh (Photo: CBS New York)
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. RELATED:
“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.”
