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.
Dave Chappelle at 2014 Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival
HARTFORD — One year after he bombed in one of the most notoriously disastrous stand-up sets in memory, Dave Chappelle made a surprise return here — and no one seemed more surprised than he.
“I didn’t think I’d ever come back to Hartford,” he said on Saturday, closing out a star-studded Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival show that was the biggest blockbuster in stand-up this summer.
After being roundly booed and heckled in 2013, Mr. Chappelle had promised that he would never return to Hartford, “not even for gas.” He also joked that if North Korea were to drop a nuclear bomb on the United States, he hoped it would fall on Hartford. He did not retract his criticism (“It was your fault,” he reminded the crowd), but on the day before his 41st birthday, he struck conciliatory notes. “I was really immature,” he conceded, before apologizing for making T-shirts that cursed the city.
The crowd embraced him without restraint, roaring when he appeared onstage, laughing throughout his set and remaining carefully quiet in between jokes. Mr. Chappelle, dressed in a long black dress shirt and smoking a cigarette, said that doing so poorly was hard on him. Then he confessed that he had not prepared anything for this show. “I figured showing up is funny enough.”
The warm show was in a stark contrast to last year’s Oddball performance, which began boisterous, turned contentious and ended with him running out his allotted time by, among other things, reading a book aloud onstage. Media accounts situated the show as part of a pattern of mercurial behavior, including his quitting his hit show on Comedy Central. Some described the evening as a meltdown, others as a crowd run amok.
As Mr. Chappelle has deftly done before, he turned bad press to his advantage, using it for comedy, starting with his next show in Chicago, where he described the Hartford crowd as “evil.” The jokes must have stung, since they earned a response from the mayor of Hartford, Pedro Segarra, who tweeted, “Dave Chappelle needs to quit whining, do his job and try some yoga.”
Mr. Chappelle’s return capped a dynamite night of stand-up comedy featuring a murderers’ row of comics, including Sarah Silverman, Hannibal Buress, Dave Attell, Amy Schumer, Aziz Ansari and Louis C.K. In a nice bit of suspense-generating stagecraft, Louis C.K., the final act on the bill, finished his set, started walking offstage, only to stop, return to the microphone and dramatically tell everyone to stay, before introducing Mr. Chappelle.
Last year’s Hartford show was so infamous that at several points, jokes by comics evoked the controversy. When after Mr. Ansari made his entrance and thanked the crowd, he made a joke demanding to know whether the audience would finally be quiet and let him speak.
Louis C.K. made an even more pointed jab by opening his set by saying of Hartford, “Nice area,” then making a wry face. The large screens picked up his smile and raised eyebrows when he held onto the moment, extending the pause, and repeating sarcastically, “Really nice.” With a new set dense with jokes, Louis C.K. was in peak form, returning to bread-and-butter subjects like raising two kids and also mining humor through some of the most unpredictable punch lines in comedy. After a setup about trying to answer the question of why babies always cry on planes, he concluded, “They are upset about gay marriage.”
Mr. Chappelle made a callback to this joke in a bit he does about Chaz Bono. While Mr. Chappelle comes off as the absent-minded enigma, he has a showman’s sense of event honed over a lifetime of performing. (He did his first stand-up set in Washington at the age of 14.) But on this night, he also seemed genuinely moved by the response.
“Are you sure this is Hartford?” Mr. Chappelle asked toward the end. Then, not much later, looking pleased and a little mischievous, he pointed to the front rows and said, “There’s someone giving me the middle finger.”
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 film rights for the “Mother of Hip Hop,” the late Sylvia Robinson (pictured), who helped put the musical genre on the map, was acquired by producer Paula Wagner, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Robinson co-founded Sugar Hill Records, the label that produced the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 classic “Rapper’s Delight,” credited as the first monster hit to get folks to sit up and pay attention to Hip-Hop. Robinson was also the machine behind such early Hip-Hop artists as Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, who recorded the classic song, “The Message.”
Wagner secured the rights to Robinson’s life story from her son, Joey, who will reportedly act as the biopic’s consultant and executive producer. Grandmaster Melle Mel, another Hip-Hop pioneer, will also wear the hat of consultant on the film.
According to Wagner, the film will span Robinson’s four decade career and encompass all of the important aspects of her busy life, including the music business, her mercurial love life and the indelible mark she left on a genre of music that has grown to immense proportions.
“Sylvia Robinson’s life story has all the elements of a great film,” said Wagner in a statement according to The Hollywood Reporter. “It is not only the story of female empowerment at a time when the world of music was male-dominated, but it’s also a story of the origin of Hip-Hop and how this woman’s determination, immense talent and savvy business sense fostered an entire musical movement.”
“This movie is going to show how my parents were able to remain independent, keep control of their publishing and master recordings and how they later dealt with the major record labels and mob associates,” added Joey. “Sugarhill paved the way for a new genre of music that the industry had no knowledge of back in 1979. You will see the struggles of what Sugarhill went through to keep Hip-Hop music alive when the industry wanted to bury it.”
Besides navigating the musical careers of performers, Robinson, herself, was a recording artist with such hits under her belt as “Love Is Strange” in 1957, as part of the duo Mickey and Sylvia and the 1973 R&B hit, “Pillow Talk,” which was a solo project. article by Ruth Manuel-Logan via newsone.com
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
Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden, the parents of slain teenager Michael Brown, attend a rally at Greater Grace Church in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 17, 2014. (SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES)
The parents of Michael Brown will be attending the rally for Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., this Saturday.
According to the Huffington Post, Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., and mother, Lesley McSpadden, will attend the rally, which is expected to draw more than 15,000 people.
Attendees will march from the location of Garner’s death to the Staten Island district attorney’s office. Supporters of the march hope that it will “symbolically link” the deaths of Brown and Garner and energize the advocacy against police brutality.
Brown’s parents were not sure of their attendance at first because they had not yet set a date for Brown’s funeral. Their legal representation, Benjamin Crump, announced Wednesday that Brown’s funeral will be held Monday.
Grammy Award-winning artist Estelle will perform at Face Forward Foundation’s Fifth Annual Gala, “A Venetian Masquerade” September 13, at The Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.
When Estelle first burst onto the scene in 2008 with the #1, double-platinum hit song “American Boy” featuring Kanye West, she quickly became an R&B sweetheart. Now slated to release her highly anticipated fourth studio album, “True Romance” on November 4, the international singer teams up with Face Forward in their mission to spread awareness and mend the physical and emotional wounds of domestic violence.
Founded by Deborah Alessi, Face Forward Foundation provides pro-bono reconstructive surgery for victims of domestic violence. As its most important fundraising and awareness-building event of the year, The Fifth Annual Gala, “A Venetian Masquerade” will raise funds with a goal of $500,000 for 2015 to support their patients and celebrate the lives and accomplishments of survivors.
Alongside the special performance, the star-studded event will be masquerade-themed, with celebrity guests, a silent auction and an honorary awards ceremony dedicated to raising funds and awareness for this increasing epidemic. Face Forward Foundation will honor celebrity and community leaders for their inspirational work and on-going efforts to draw awareness to domestic violence. Confirmed guests include: Missy Piles(Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Artist), Jennifer Coolidge (American Pie, Legally Blonde), Shohreh Aghdashloo(24), Bonnie Sommerville(Ugly Truth),Shaun Toub(Iron Man). To purchase tickets, visit http://faceforward.nbblticketing.com/
Since its creation in 2007, Face Forward has worked with advocates around the nation to identify victims of domestic violence who are working towards recovery, yet carry the physical evidence of past abuse. Face Forward does more than just provide pro bono reconstructive surgery to adults and children who have suffered from traumatic and physical abuse; they also create a welcoming and safe environment for the victims to start a new life and reclaim their confidence.
Deborah Alessi, Founder of Face Forward Foundation says “The work that we do turns our victims of abuse into victors in life and we have been fortunate to impact many lives with profoundly life changing results. Changing the outward appearance gives them the confidence to address the scars on the inside and move beyond their past to obtain fulfilling futures. ”
With domestic violence occurring every 15 seconds in the United States, Face Forward Foundation strives to alleviate the internal and external scars of victims and those affected. Ninety percent of all rape and abuse cases lead to physical disfigurement and Face Forward provides treatment to victims who are not able to afford medical assistance. Read more at http://www.eurweb.com/2014/08/estelle-teams-up-with-face-forward-foundation-to-sing-out-against-domestic-violence/#G4Y6cLsiFPjUS7x5.99
