MIAMI – Arnold Donald has swag. Not the phony suburban swag, but that old-school, down-home New Orleans Black neighborhood kind of swag that signals the confident chief executive strolling into the board room is clearly in charge. As Carnival Corporation’s first African-American CEO, Donald has prepared for this high-level, high-profile, high-paid position all his life.
At the prestigious St. Augustine High School in New Orleans, an all-boys, all-African-American Catholic school where Donald received a scholarship, he recalled this inspirational mantra from his teachers: “Three times a day, they would say: ‘Gentlemen, prepare yourselves, you’re going to run the world.’ ”
It’s close enough. Today, Donald, 60, leads the world’s largest cruise line with 120,000 employees and 100 ships for the 10.5 million passengers who cruise with Carnival each year. Sitting inside his spacious 10th-floor office at Carnival Corp. in suburban Miami, Donald talked about his vision for leading the Carnival Corporation. For Donald, it’s all about trying to offer unprecedented customer service.
He spends some of his time sifting through “psycho-graphics” to determine which of his nine “brands” – cruise ships — will best suit individual passengers. He enjoys talking to “guests” about their experiences while cruising and often asks passengers how Carnival can better serve them.
“We’re in the vacation business and part of our job is to help people have a good time,” Donald said in an interview with BlackAmericaWeb.com. “We can’t make more very fast. We can’t sell more volume. It’s not like selling shoes. Our ships sail full, we can’t sell more cabins, you can’t just build as many ships as you want in a year, there are only so many shipyards and they are limited in the number of ships they can build in a year.” “So we want to create onboard experiences where we’re giving the guests what they want,” he explained. “And therefore they are willing to pay for it. So the trick is to determine what the guests really want.”
Vicki L. Crawford, director of the Morehouse Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, said that “we are excited about the opportunity to collaborate with the University of Georgia Press to publish a series of books inspired by the unparalleled documents in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection. As a gathering of teachable texts, this series is an important step in our mission to foster greater understanding of Dr. King and the movement for civil and human rights.”
Protesters, using hashtags like #Antlanta and #AnthonyHill are questioning the use of force against Hill, an Air Force veteran who was naked and unarmed, when he was shot and killed by a white police officer on Monday.
Activists announced the protest with an email asking this very question reports the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
“Anthony was naked and unarmed at the time of the shooting, yet Officer Olsen found him to be enough of a threat to take his life.”
The officer who shot Hill, a seven-year veteran of the force has been identified by police as Robert Olsen, and has been placed on administrative leave, reports Reuters via The Huffington Post.
Hill was shot after he was dealing with what looked to be a mental health issue, said the DeKalb County police Chief Cedric Alexander on Monday. Alexander confirmed that police received a call about a man “acting deranged, knocking on doors, and crawling around on the ground naked.”
After “running towards a responding officer,” Hill was shot twice. Police found no weapon. Almost immediately, Twitter was flooded with the hashtags #AnthonyHill and #BlackLivesMatter.
Ironically, Hill had used the #BlackLivesMatter himself in the days before his death, reports Reuters:
“The key thing to remember is, #blacklivesmatter, ABSOLUTELY, but not moreso than any other life,” Hill wrote on his Facebook page on March 6.
In another post the same day, he said, “No man (or woman) is ever going to stop me from living the life I envision…Empower yourself. Show these kids that #blacklivesmatter by living yours like it does.”
Hill is at least the third African-American man since Friday who was unarmed when shot dead by police. Thousands have been rallying for the last few days in the streets of Madison Wisconsin for 19-year-old Tony Robinson, who was killed by police last week. Aurora, Colorado police confirmed that Naeschylus Vinzant, 37, was unarmed when he was shot and killed with one bullet by police on Friday.
Hill’s shooting investigation went to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in an effort at “transparency.”
article by Angela Bronner Helm via newsone.com
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has just 
Wesley Hogan, the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the author of