Gov. Paterson Impresses Diverse Audience at Brooklyn Town Hall Meeting: Commands Moment, Impactful on State Budget Crisis

A confident Governor Paterson was well-received at a Town Hall meeting about the New York State budget at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall on Monday and no one can accuse him of sugar-coating the economic message.   Paterson began with a brief historical analysis of how governments have changed the names of financial problems from Poland’s Crisis of 1899 to the Great Depression of the 1930s to what is today called a “recession.”  The point of his lesson was that whatever it’s called, the pain is the same.  “A recession is next door,” said the governor.  “When you’re the one who’s lost a home or a job, that starts to feel like a depression.”    
Paterson says New York State can be looking at a Depression if action is not taken now.   And the action he has taken, he frankly detailed.  “In my administration we have cut $4.5 billion from health care, we’ve cut $1.1 billion from education, we’ve cut our administration, our agencies, by $1.5 billion  and in this year’s budget we’re going to cut it some more.  We’re going to have to cut health care another billion, education a 5% reduction of $1.1 billion and another billion from our agencies, including $250 million from workforce reduction.”
Governor Paterson was quite clear in his warning when he said, “I came here to tell you that today we’re Crossing the Rubicon in terms of moving from recession to something else far worse if my colleagues and I can’t close a $9.2 billion deficit.”  They had successfully closed an  $18 billion deficit last year, said the governor,  “but we had more options.  We’ve used them up.  We’ve depleted our resources.”
The governor then asked for suggestions but reminded the assembled that wherever a program is to be saved, “we also have to know how we’re going to pay for it,” because the state may run out of money by May or June. 
Suggestions ran from borrowing from other countries; “most are in the same boat we are,” said Governor Paterson, although he added he has suggested that the Treasury could lend to highly rated governments at a favorable rate of return.  Queen Mother Blakely’s suggestion that it would be cheaper if state institutions purchased Queen Mother’s Organic Coffee from her women-owned enterprise and queried as to how she should proceed.  The governor acknowledged that, “There is a lot of purchasing the state does and we’ll have someone speak to you about that.” 
Dave Taylor said the governor may not remember him, but he was from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and came representing the Council of Senior Services to say that senior citizen centers throughout the five boroughs are currently under review by the NYC Department of the Aging to determine which should be closed.  “Seniors are terrified.  We are faced with the possibility of 75 centers being closed throughout the city.  Will you take Title 20 off the table and stop the closing of senior centers?”   “Dave Taylor, I remember you well from the Upper West Side,” responded the governor.  “And if I remember correctly, I think you ran for City Council in 1989.”
Mr. Taylor’s question was an opportunity for Governor Paterson to show the dilemmas his administration is faced with.  “A kind of triage,” is how he puts it.  Two of the deficit culprits are the surge in Medicaid costs – “about $400 million” – and the Wall Street bonuses that were paid in stock, not in cash and therefore couldn’t be taxed. 
“When the bonuses are not paid, they don’t go back to the public, they go to the firms,” explained the governor.  “And the firms have very favorable tax benefits and ways in which when the money goes back to the firms, we can’t tax it at the same rate as if it was paid in bonuses.  This cost us another half a billion dollars.” As the governor put it, “This was the public relations way that Wall Street is adjusting to the attacks on the high bonuses.”
Describing the economic environment he is in, Paterson said, “It is hard to take things off the table when actually we still have to come up with another billion dollars.”
He insisted that his administration is “particularly careful and scrupulous of those who live on the edge:  Seniors. Homeless people with disabilities and people who don’t have many options.”  And yet while still being mindful of the very real pain these cuts cause, New York State has to move forward and “the only reason it’s on the table is because of the dire state that we’re in.”
Councilman Charles Barron spoke in favor of looking for money where money is: wealthy folk. He called for a Stock Transfer Tax as a way to recapture some of that Wall Street money and congratulated the governor for blazing the path of taxing the wealthy. “I think you were bold.  You were one of the few governors who had the heart and the spine to raise the PIT, Personal Income Tax surcharge, on those earning $250,000 or more and we got about  $4 billion out of that.  Let’s go up further, those making $500,000, charge 2.5%  Those making a million, 7.5%.    You cannot have a budget process and say that raising taxes on the rich is off the table.  If you want to be fiscally prudent, then everything stays on the table: cutting us, taxing the rich and selling state assets.  Tax the rich and put some of our stuff back in the budget.”
Describing an imposition of a Stock Transfer Tax as “tantalizing” Paterson said, “The Stock Transfer Tax began in 1905, and in 1966 it was shifted and the Transfer Tax benefited New York City.  It was reduced between 1978 and 1981 and here’s why.  We’re not living in the kind of world as in 1905.  We’re living in an electronic environment.  If you want to move Wall Street to Downtown Newark or Greenwich, Connecticut, impose a Stock Transfer Tax.  They don’t need the geographic location of
Wall Street to operate any more.”
The governor then offered a suggestion of his own on retrieving some of the Wall Street bonus money.   “What I think we should do is talk to Wall Street, which is the engine of our economy, about the way they are shifting resources that just denied New York State half a billion dollars this year and half a billion next year.  I do think there is a discussion that we have to have with the major firms on Wall Street about how to support New York State, which is supporting them.” 
On the issue of taxes the governor agreed that he had enacted one of the most stringent taxes on the wealthy, over 9%,  “for which we got a lot of criticism,”  but his administration has found that this approach has diminishing returns.  As proof, he offered that they had projected over $4 billion in revenue but actually got in only $3.6 billion.  Apparently, people’s loyalty to New York does not extend to paying more in taxes.  “The problem is people will say they moved to Florida, and stay there one more day a year than they do here in New York, and for that, they don’t pay any taxes at all.”
To a question regarding the Atlantic Yards project, Paterson said he had waited for the Court of Appeals to make a decision regarding the use of Eminent Domain in the taking of private property for private use and was surprised that it allowed the taking to move forward.  “And now the Supreme Court has made a decision.  There was a process, I did not want to impose my own judgment where there has already been a court decision in the matter.”
Councilwoman Letitia James said there could be savings in closing empty upstate prisons and merging redundant agencies.  Paterson responded that they have already begun the merging of agencies, but said the savings are “only in the tens of millions of dollars,” and they’re looking at a multibillion-dollar hole to fill.
Councilwoman James had also brought up the subject of the proposed Sugar Tax, which she said was a regressive tax.  Perhaps because the governor’s schedule showed his next stop was a Sugared Beverage Tax Symposiumÿ in the Blue Room of the Capitol he took to the question like a bear to honey.
“In the end it may be regressive, but it’s a different kind of tax,” the governor insisted, “because all of the tax collected is designated for health care services.   We are losing $8 billion a year from people smoking and almost as much, $7.5 billion a year, treating diabetes, heart disease and other ailments coming from obesity, largely caused by sugar.  Companies have freely sold these products in our communities and put them in serious, serious physical condition and we’ve never taken a look at that.” Paterson spoke of the proliferation of hospital units around the country treating childhood stroke and heart attack victims. 
“We assessed how much money we would get from a Sugar Tax but we also assessed that there would be a 15% drop-off in the market.  This will drop the amount of money the taxpayer is paying for health care.  60% of adults in the state are obese,  25% of children and 33% of minority children are obese.  80% of African-American women are obese.  Well, okay, 79%.  I’m speaking for a class of people who don’t have a vote.  And that’s the children of this state. And when their parents come down here and shaking the wall  about their children having heart attacks, it’s not going to be on my conscience.”
Also speaking for the children was Ms. Jackson of AARP Chapter 2197 who asked, “Why are we cutting Kin Care when it saves the state money.   We have over 400,000 children in Kin Care.  Keeping those children out of the foster care actually saves money.  We need that $2 million for those children,  keeping them with their families, the Kin Care program builds family bonds as well as saves the state money.”   Paterson said he would go back and take a look at the Kin Care program.   “But,” he said, “If the premise of your question is that we have made cuts that otherwise brought revenues into the state, what I want to tell you is that’s how dire our situation is.”  He gave the example of the Parks System where he said every dollar the state spends generates $5 in revenue.  “The problem is we don’t have the dollar to open the parks.” 
The governor describes a scene much like a family at the kitchen table holding back on paying the cable bill in order to pay the rent.  “We have to make payments to local governments at the end of March and payments on Medicaid.  We are $2 billion short on those payments and nobody knows where we’re going to come up with the money.  That’s why we discussed holding back the tax returns for two weeks.  That would bring about $500 million into the $2 billion we have to pay.  These are not choices.  These are necessities.”

Coalition Campaigns to End Prison-Based Gerrymandering

Senator Eric T. Schneiderman and Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries joined forces with a statewide coalition today to announce a new organizing campaign plan to end prison-based gerrymandering in New York State before the 2010 Census.
The coalition’s goal is to organize across the state to pass Senator Schneiderman’s bill that would require New York State to count incarcerated persons in their home communities-rather than in the districts where they are incarcerated-for purposes of drawing legislative district lines. If passed, it would be the first law in the nation to count prisoners in their home communities for districting purposes.
“It’s an absolute injustice that New York currently counts people in the districts where they are incarcerated, rather than in their home communities. I am proud to be here to join forces with Sen. Schneiderman, Assm. Jeffries and this coalition to end this unconstitutional practice. If we do not act soon, it will be 10 long years for another opportunity to right this wrong. We cannot afford to wait,” said Rev. Al Sharpton.
“Equal representation under the law benefits everyone,” said Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, the lead sponsor of the bill to end prison-based gerrymandering. “The practice of counting people where they are incarcerated undermines the fundamental principle of ‘one person, one vote’ – it’s undemocratic and reflects a broken system. This legislation is as simple as it is fair: it requires that legislative districts at every level of government contain an equal numbers of residents. The time to act is now.”
Assemblyman Jeffries is the bill’s lead sponsor in the Assembly.
“This bill is necessary to break the back of the prison industrial complex where certain communities benefit from the criminalization of young people who disproportionately come from low-income neighborhoods across the state. Prison-based gerrymandering is unfair, unethical and unconstitutional, and we will not rest until the process is changed,” said Assemblyman. Jeffries.
 ”Prison-based gerrymandering continues to cheat needy communities of fair and equitable representation across the state of New York. This archaic formula perpetuates traditional electoral disparities by insuring that many men and women of color be counted by the U.S. Census in counties where they are incarcerated as opposed to where they resided at the time of their arrest. This practice cheats neighborhoods of much needed resources as well as a fair share of political representation,” said Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat, a co-sponsor of the bill.
The new coalition was represented by Citizen Action of New York, The Public Policy and Education Fund, The Prison Policy Initiative, New York Civil Liberties Union, Demos, Common Cause, the Brennan Center for Justice, Fortune Society, Bronx Defenders, Praxis Project, Correctional Association of New York, Community Service Society, New York City AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Center for Law & Social Justice, Nu Leadership Policy Group, Prison Families of New York and Exponents. The announcement was followed by a statewide organizing meeting that included more than 50 community-based organizations focused on passing this legislation.
Eddie Ellis, executive director, Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, Medgar Evers College, CUNY, said, “This critical piece of legislation speaks to the fundamental principle of a participatory democracy, namely: ‘one man/woman, one vote.’ In additional to violating the constitution of the state of New York regarding residency, the current census counting process for incarcerated people also violates the ‘one man/woman, one vote’ principle in as much as it assigns disproportionate representation to certain counties to the detriment of others. As such, this process must be changed.”
“When the Census tallies incarcerated people at prison locations far from home, the picture of the American civic community is distorted, with profound ramifications for our democracy,” says Erika Wood of the Brennan Center for Justice. “The policy gives public officials in prison districts an incentive to build their districts on the backs of ‘ghost voters,’ packing in prisoners who count toward the district size but who are not permitted to vote.”
“New York State is undermining the core American principles of fairness and equal representation by pretending that inmates are legitimate constituents of the districts where they are incarcerated,” said New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman. “Our state must end this corruption of the political process and count all New Yorkers as members of their home communities.”
“Common Cause/NY applauds Senator Schneiderman and Assembly Member Jeffries for their leadership in righting an obvious wrong,” said Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause/NY. She added, “In order to achieve fairly drawn legislative and congressional districts and insure the efficient use of scarce government resources, it is essential that the census miscount of incarcerated New Yorkers not be the basis for redistricting and distribution of resources. Article II, Sec. 4 of our state constitution demands no less.”

Call Them Phenomenal, THESE DAUGHTERS of TUBMAN

“Freedom or die a slave!,” declared  Harriet Tubman (1819/20-1913) who freed herself and 300 others from enslavement in the mid-19th century.  Tubman’s legacy resounds today in the lives of heirs who move unrestricted and make choices with few constraints. 
Call them daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, aunts, educators, nurses, doctors, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, bakers, filmmakers, artists, chefs, librarians, homemakers, landowners, students, realtors, musicians, even First Ladies – in roles nonexistent for women of color in America at the time of Harriet Tubman’s birth.
Call them liberators, revolutionaries, strategists, rainmakers and deep thinkers (as Tubman was), qualities considered “uncharacteristic” for Black women even a little more than a century ago at the time of her death in Auburn, NY in 1913.

Mrs. Tubman was this nation’s first nationally known woman leader, soldier, strategist, counselor, social worker. And beginning March 10, the 97th anniversary of her death, New Yorkers will join other groups throughout the nation in celebrating Tubman by honoring women of conviction.
 Dr. Olivia Cousins, the artist/photographer/educator, comments:  “In celebrating Harriet, we carry forth her legacy in the day-to-day work that we do to protect, nurture, advocate and uplift our people.”  Following are March events that honor our journey and the Tubman legacy. See page 6.
Tuesday, March 9 at 7pm: The Spelman College Glee Club performs at Emmanuel Baptist Church, 279 Lafayette Ave. (corner of St. James Place).  Concert is free and open to the public!!! Note to parents and guardians of young women:  The Spelman College Glee Club has maintained a formal reputation of choral excellence since its inception in 1925. Its repertoire consists of secular choral literature for women’s voices with special emphasis on traditional spirituals, music by African-American composers, music from different cultures and other commissioned works. The Spelman legacy of song is inextricably entwined in the institution’s history. The founders of Spelman College, Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles, sought to establish and teach a curriculum that ensured a well-rounded educational experience. The beginnings of the Spelman College Glee Club can be traced back to 1882, just one year after the college opened.

Wednesday, March 10, 9:00am – 11:30am: The 7th Annual Harriet Tubman Day Celebration, In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, hosted by Councilman Al Vann at Boys & Girls H.S., presents comments from Pauline Copes-Johnson of Auburn, NY and her sister, Geraldine Daniels of Rochester, NY, the great-great-grandnieces of “Aunt Harriet.” Brooklyn Public Library chief Dionne Mack-Harvin will keynote.
Wednesday, March 10, 10:00am: Wreath Laying in the Harriet Tubman Memorial Park at the base of the only statue in New York City of Harriet Tubman, a two-ton 10-foot-tall bronze sculpture designed by Alison Saar, at the intersection of Frederick Douglass Boulevard (formerly Eighth Avenue), St. Nicholas Avenue and 122nd Street.  The event will include the participation of schoolchildren, City Government officials and the New York City Parks Department. Adrianne Riddick of Harlem, Ms. Tubman’s great-great-great-grandniece, will speak at the wreath-laying event.  The statue is the brainchild of former Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields.  Omoye Cooper of Albany, NY and Elizabeth Fulcher-Rankin of Brooklyn are co-chairs of the Black Women’s Leadership Caucus, Inc. (BWLC) host organization which was formed in 1999 during a meeting at the Tubman Homestead in Auburn, NY of women and men involved in the history of the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman.  Currently, the group is producing a short documentary about Harriet Tubman, featuring interviews with  descendants, historians and and distinguished educators, including  Adelaide Sanfor, former Vice Chancellor, NYS Board of Regents. Open to the public.
Thursday, March 11, 11a-2p: Network Journal’s  “Influential Women in Business Awards” Publisher/CEO Aziz Adetimirin and editor Rosalind McLymont will honor business leaders at the “Twelfth Annual 25 Influential Black Women in Business Awards” luncheon at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, 1535 Broadway (between 45th & 46th streets). Among the honorees: Jackie Carter, Vice President & Publisher, Nonfiction Books, Scholastic, Inc.; Susan E. Chapman, Global Head of Operations, Citi, Realty Service, Citi Inc.; Chrysa Chin, Vice President, Player Development, National Basketball Association (NBA); Denise Coley, Director, Global Supplier Diversity Business Development, Cisco Systems, Inc.; Michelle Drayton, President & Publisher, Today’s Child Communications; Angela E. Guy, Senior Vice President, General Manager, SoftSheen-Carson; Gale Stevens-Haynes, Esq., Provost, Long Island University, Bklyn Campus; Vy Higginsen, Executive Director, Mama Foundation for the Arts; Hilda Hutcherson, M.D., Associate Dean, Clinical Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons;  and Mavis T. Thompson, Esq., President, National Bar Association; and others.
 Saturday, March 20, 1p-4p: 2nd Women of Distinction Scholarship Luncheon at Boys & Girls H.S.  The luncheon salutes distinguished women for their unwavering support of and service to the community and Boys & Girls High School and supports a great scholarship- creation opportunity for some of New York’s best and brightest graduating students. Money raised through ticket sales, a Silent Auction adn donations at the event go to the scholarships.  As we see it, The Women of Distnction Awards refers to both the students and the distinguished honorees, who include Pamela Green, Weeksville Heritage Center; Crystal Bobb-Semple, founder and owner, Brownstone Books; educator Dr. Renee Young; guidance counselor Dorothy Harper, (celebrating 43 years in the education field); Miss Kelly Roberts, school safety agent; Dr. Sheila Evans-Tranumn, retired associate commissioner for the NYS Education Department; and Ms. Nebert Jackson, retired educator who taught for some 30 years at Boys & Girls H.S.  The Boys & Girls H.S. graduating seniors who worked hard throughout the school year to raise funds for college needs, include:  Alicia Rogers, Areya Cortes, Shatiqua Watson, Brittany George, Adana David, Melissa DeVore, Amandla McMillan, Shardei Lewis and Deborah Akinbowale. The event is the culminating activity of the year-long campaign, and anyone wanting to support the effort can donate items or services for the silent auction; food for the March 20 luncheon;and/or contributions to the students’ scholarship fund. Contact:  Miss Andrea Toussaint of The Sisterhood.Tickets: $25. 718-467-1700.
  

Sunday, March 28: “Harriet’s Place: Underground Railroad and Beyond” at Magnolia – New exhibition of photographs capturing the essence of Harriet Tubman, the woman, by educator/artist/historian/preservationist Dr. Olivia Cousins, opens today at Magnolia Tree Earth Center of Bedford Stuyvesant.  Details to be announced. Contact: Andrea Brathwaite at 718-387-2116 or Bernice Elizabeth Green at 718-599-6828.  (See Cover)
Monday, March 29: Herbert Von King Park’s Third Phenomenal Women Awards Brunch: Culinary and Drama Teens at the Park, and Parks Administrator Lemuel Mial with volunteer instructor-wife Charlotte Mial, with community friends DBG Media and Legacy Ventures, at a closed, invitation-only event, will honor media women, the communicators, whose on-going good works keep positive stories and information about our communities at the forefront. Among the honorees:  Mrs. Esther Jackson, Founder and Publisher, Freedomways; Nayaba Arinde, Editor, NY Amsterdam News; Freelance Journalist and Media Consultants Victoria Horsford and Fern Gillespie; Dr. Brenda Greene, Founder, National Black Writers Conference; Medgar Evers College, CUNY; Aminisha Black, columnist, Our Time Press; author-entrepreneur Monique Greenwood, now celebrating her  popular Akwaaba Inns’ 15th year; writer Susan McHenry; Janel Gross, The Challenge Group; Jeanne Parnell, anchor, WHCR; Dr. Teresa Taylor-Williams, publisher, Trend Newspaper; and Gayle DeWees of the NY Daily News, also the former employer of the late Joyce Shelby, the adored journalist to whom this event is dedicated.
Mrs. Jackson  and Tupper Thomas, head of the Prospect Park Alliance, will receive the Hattie Carthan Awards.
  -Bernice Elizabeth Green

Where to Count Prisoners Leads Concerns at Congressional Hearing on Census

Issue Impact Redistricting and Federal Funds

Where prisoners are counted as living determines both electoral districts as well as how many federal dollars are available for everything from job creation to food stamps and other human needs.  With 75% of prisoners in upstate New York coming from seven zip codes in New York City, it was an area of special concern at the congressional hearing of The Information Policy, Census and National Archives Subcommittee held at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall this past Monday.

The hearing on Group Quarters such as prisons, schools and nursing homes, chaired by Congressman William Lacy Clay, Jr. and held jointly with the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Congressman Ed Towns, took testimony from  Census Director Dr. Robert Groves that since 1790, the United States Census Bureau has counted people using the usual Residency Rule, i.e., where they eat, sleep and live most of the time.
Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative, had a startling statistic: the 2.3 million people incarcerated is larger than the population of 15 states.  “Some districts are 80-90% prisoners” he told the committee.  The Web site for the Initiative says that “In New York State, for example, one out of every three people who moved to upstate New York in the 1990s actually ‘moved’ into a newly constructed prison. The state bars people in prison from voting, but their presence in the Census boosts the population of the upstate districts whose legislators favor prison expansion. Without this phantom population, seven upstate New York Senate districts would not meet minimum population requirements and would have to be redrawn.”
Currently, with prisoners included as residents of the county where they are incarcerated, rather than where they came from, the federal dollars for social services based on population are sent to counties where the prisons are located, even though the prisoners don’t use any local services and the counties where the prisoners come from, usually high-need areas, lose the dollars earmarked to provide them with services.
They can’t do  an individual count/interview because of the security. The bureau depends on administrative records to count the prisoners.  In later testimony, Mr. Thomas Ellet, Associate Vice President of Student Affairs at New York University, said that in terms of the accuracy of administrative records, the quality varies across systems, “particularly in prisons.”
Wagner later reminded the congressmen that legally speaking the prisoners have not left their homes.  Here he was referring to the NY Constitution which says that “no person shall be deemed to have gained or lost a residence by reason of his presence or absence … while confined in any public prison.”   And he said that the legislature can do something this year to include the prisoners in the count of their home addresses.  
The bureau is taking the position that the Census is not proposing to change where people are counted, and are leaving it up to the states to determine how that count will be used in the reapportionment process, where political districts are drawn to contain the same number of people in order to adhere to a federally-mandated “one man, one vote” standard.   Dr. Groves agreed with Chairman Clay that he was glad not to be a part of the redistricting process.  According to Senator Velmanette Montgomery’s office, a Bill in the NYS Senate is due to be proposed momentarily.
Chairman Towns asked Robert Goldenkoff, Director of Strategic Issues for the Government Accountability Office, about the technological readiness of the Census Bureau for the April 1st start date.  Goldenkoff divided the problems into categories.  First: People, the technicians are falling behind schedule and can’t take away the time from doing the work to train new people. Second was Hardware: the Census computers are simply outdated.  Third was Software, where defects are continuing to mount and of course four, the Schedule.  The operation has a fixed date (April 1st.) when the system must be ready.  He acknowledged that the Bureau has gained some time by scaling back from the full-blown version as originally envisioned, but said that even at the reduced level, the bureau remains challenged to hit the April 1st mark.
Looking to improve the job the Census does in traditionally undercounted areas such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Chairman Towns asked Dr. Groves if the discretionary funds the Bureau has could be used to target areas such as Kings County that have been traditionally undercounted in the past.  “We need to get the information out to the people, using local news and local press.” Dr. Groves responded that they were advertising to the grassroots level, using community newspapers. [ Publisher's Note: we haven't gotten any.] As for the discretionary funds, Dr. Groves said that response rates to the mailing were being analyzed and areas that appeared to be undercounted will be the target for the discretionary funds.

Africans in the Americas-Parts 1 & 2

The first explorers from Africa arrive on the north and south equatorial currents spanning the Atlantic Ocean between the African and American continents.  Historian Ivan Van Sertima points to these forces as a natural conveyor belt between West Africa and the Americas.  

The most striking physical evidence of Africans is the distinctively Negroid stone heads of the Olmec civilization.   Dr. Van Sertima reports that the archaeological context in which they were found has been radio carbon dated to 800 B.C. To judge the impact of that African presence, Van Sertima tells us this:  “At the sacred center of the Olmec culture-La Venta about eighteen miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico which flows into the Atlantic, there stood four colossal Negroid heads, six to nine feet high, weighing up to forty tons each.  They stood in large squares or plazas in front of the most colorful temple platforms, the sides and floors of which were of red, yellow and purple.  They stood twelve to twenty times larger than the faces of living men.  They were like gods among the Olmecs. 

There is a Mandingo head of fourteenth century Mexico, which may be all that is left of the vision of Abubakari, the Second Emperor of Mali.  His was a land where “thousands of Arab and Egyptian caravans passed every year through Timbuktu and Niani. He stood on the western shore of his empire and sent forth two expeditions totaling 2,400 ships, to discover the limits of the sea, circa 1310 a.d.    For Abubakari, his empire ended at the sea that had stopped Alexander the Great but it would not stop this emperor of the largest empire on earth.  He was so passionate in his belief in a world beyond the sea that he lead the second expedition himself.  Van Sertima, reporting from oral histories that have been passed down to this day, writes:  “…One day, dressed in a flowing white robe and a jeweled turban, he took leave of Mali and set out with his fleet down to Senegal, heading west across the Atlantic, never to return.  He took his griot and half his history with him.”   What a tale that griot could tell if we could hear him now.  Because Abubakari never returned to Africa, this gravesite may be evidence that he stretched his empire farther than was known at that time. 
Christopher Columbus heard the stories, now common along the African coast, of a New World across the sea.  Arriving in the Americas in the 1490’s, he was in time to see African settlements, speak of African artifacts in letters and hear stories from native villagers of the Africans who had preceded him.
By the 1700’s, African civilizations had fallen and Europeans began using Africans as work animals to be captured in Africa, packed and shipped for a month’s-long Middle Passage across the Atlantic and sold in the Americas to work the wealth from the land the Europeans were taking from the native people.  During this period, Africans came not as adventuring seamen, but were brought as chattel. 
 ”The period of the 1500’s and 1600’s came after a thousand years of great independent states in West Africa,” says Professor Clarke.   “After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south.  They destroyed the great independent states in West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western slave trade.”
As any other nationalities, when Africans were brought to this hemisphere, they came carrying  their many languages and their learning. But unlike any other nationality, everything else was taken from them, and they were delivered physically and psychologically decimated and naked on these shores.
Those that survived the 240 years of the Middle Passage (1619-1859), found themselves now Africans-in-America, held captive by a people who viewed them as property enough to be bought and sold, but human enough to be raped.  Forbidden their own languages, the Africans began to use local words to identify objects and their environment. They standardized on the local language, whether it was French, Portuguese or English. For the Africans, this learning process had to be done in an atmosphere of terror where killings and beatings were only a glance away. As the centuries passed, and as American slavery centered more in the southern United States, many Africans escaped into the North or joined others in the tribes of the indigenous people. Communities were formed from the Seminoles of Florida to the Brooklyn, NY districts of Weeksville and Vinegar Hill.
Escapees to the North found each other through each other and worked together to build their communities. By the 1800’s, the Africans had positioned themselves to build schools and large churches.  In the pamphlet Weeksville Then and Now, authors Joan Maynard and Gwen Cottman show the importance of learning and self-help to the Africans. They have a replica of The Freedmen’s Torchlight, a community newspaper published by the African Civilization Society which was housed in its own building on the corner of Dean Street and Troy Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. Dated December1866, a year after the Civil War ended, “it included stirring statements of its philosophy of Black self-help, information on the Freedman’s Schools, featured moral anecdotes and listings of their contributors. The front page was devoted to the Alphabet, Basic English, Arithmetic, Geography and view of the nature of God and Man. In this way, the newspaper also served as a textbook for the newly freed slaves to learn reading and writing.” “Some organizations prior to and during the development of Weeksville were the New York Society for Mutual Relief, founded in 1808; the African Woolmen Society, founded in 1810; the Brooklyn African Tompkins Society, founded circa 1827 and the Weeksville Assistance Society, circa 1854. A chapter of the Prince Hall Free and Accepted Masons started in Brooklyn with the formation of Widows Sons Lodge No. II in 1849.” And then there were the churches. “Brooklyn’s first Black church, the Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church, was incorporated in 1818. Along with Siloam Presbyterian, (founded ).  This church had the reputation of being a terminal on the Underground Railroad.  “Education for Black children in Brooklyn grew from the independent efforts of Black religious leaders such as Peter Croger, who had a school in his home in 1815. In 1819, William M. Read, a graduate of the New York African Free School, was teaching Black children in segregated settings. However by 1827, even these quarters were denied. By 1840, some Manhattan Black folks who had settled in Carsville, just south of Weeksville, had established another African school.”

While this was going on in Brooklyn, legal slavery was the reality for the vast majority of Africans in the United States.  Because it was against the law to teach Africans to read and write (and the penalty for doing so could be death), this learning had to be done in secret places, by an exhausted people who had been worked hard in the fields from sun-up to sun down. And it was by candlelight that the English language was learned. More generations of social isolation passed, and some of those Africans who remained captured in the South were being called upon to perform more and more complex tasks on the plantations and in the manufacturing areas. They were used as expert farmers, builders and craftspeople. Brooklyn Professor William Mackey notes that the furnishings of Thomas Jefferson’ s mansion were made by slaves.   The house itself was built by them. Many masters were breeding their personal slaves themselves. Fathering mulatto children who were raised with their white children and often educated with them as well.
Frederick Douglas was such a man, and his command of the English language, in speech and by pen, took him to world recognition as the publisher of  The North Star  newspaper, and as a leading abolitionist.
The buying and selling of human beings during the American slave trade was the biggest business the world has ever known.  In a text on the period, H. A. Texler writes in Slavery in Missouri, 1805-1865,  “The slave trade was partly systematic, partly casual. For local sales, every public auctioneer handled slaves along with other property, and in each city there were brokers buying them to sell again, or handling them on commission. One of these at New Orleans in 1854 was Thomas Foster, who advertised that he would pay the highest prices for sound Negroes as well as sell those whom merchants or private citizens might consign him. Expecting to receive Negroes throughout the season, he said he would have a constant stock of mechanics, domestics and field hands; and in addition he would house as many as three hundred slaves at a time, importing them from other states.    Similarly, Clark and Grubb of Whitehall Street in Atlanta, when advertising their business as wholesale grocers, commission merchants and Negro brokers, announced that they kept slaves of all classes constantly on hand and were paying the highest market prices for all that might be offered.  In St. Louis in 1859, Corbin Thompson and Bernard M. Lynch were the principal slave dealers. The rates of the latter, according to his placard, were 37 1/2 cents per day for board and 2 1/2 percent, commission on sales; and all slaves entrusted to his care were to be held at their owners’ risk.”
More money was invested in slaves than all stock-in-trade, including bank stock, incorporated funds and more.  This is indicative of the value placed on an unpaid labor pool, and with good reason.  The land was virgin territory which had to be converted into cash.  It was the slaves who made it income-producing. 
According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the first estimate of national wealth of the United States is found in Economics: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America, 1806 edition by Samuel Blodget, Jr. (See Table 1). Of the $2,505 million  dollars (2.5 billion) of national wealth, $1,661 million was in land stolen from the indigenous people and $200 million was the value assigned to the slaves.
Ulrich Phillips, writing in American Negro Slavery, notes, “The accompanying chart will  show the fluctuations of the average prices of prime field hands (unskilled young men) in Virginia, at Charleston, in middle Georgia and at New Orleans, as well as the contemporary range of average prices for cotton of middling grade in the chief American market, that of New York.  The range for prime slaves, it will be seen, raised from about $300 and $400 a head in the upper and lower South, respectively in 1795 to a range of from $400 to $600 in 1803…”   By using these figures we find that the minimum amount of money invested in slaves was $521,366,000 in 1805.   Therefore, the total national wealth could be more accurately calculated as  2.8 billion dollars ($2,826,366,000), adding an additional 300 million to Blodget’s figure.   This means that 77% of the total national wealth of the United States in 1805 ($2,182,366,000) was based on holding African-Americans as property to work the stolen land.
By 1856, there were 3,580,023 slaves according to an average of the 1850 and 1860 Census counts.   Bear in mind here that in 1813, Congress laid a direct tax on property, including “houses, lands and slaves.”  This meant that there was now an economic motivation to under count this part of the owners’ property – the fewer slaves reported, the less taxes paid;  slaves were easier to hide than houses or land.  This is coupled with the natural inclination of the census to under count the Black population.   The evidence is clear in the General Population Statistics, 1790-1990.  By 1860, the “percentage increase in Black population over preceding census” averaged 28.8% since 1790.  In the 1870 census, the percentage growth was only 9.9%.   So what happened to the other 18.9% of the expected population?  They disappeared in 1865 with the Emancipation Proclamation.  No longer having a value attached to them, these 859,000 African-Americans were lost.  It’s been 120 years, and judging from the low-count controversy of the 1990 Census, the Bureau hasn’t found them yet, although they are reported to be looking for next year’s 2000 Census.  We can safely regard these counts as the way-down-low end of an actual population estimate.
By 1856, the advertised prices for African-Americans on one document of that time ranged from a high of $2,700 for Anderson, a “No.1 bricklayer and mason,” and $1,900 for George, a “No. 1 blacksmith,” to $750 for Reuben, even though he was labeled “unsound.”  (See Railroad Contractor’s Credit Sale document of a choice gang of 41 slaves.)   The average cost for this lot of people was  $1,488.   As a second reference for this number, we can look at the chart for the cost of Prime Field Hands, and find that it is pretty accurate.   By multiplying the census count of slaves by the average advertised price, we arrive at a value of $5.3 billion ($5,327,079,968).    This may not look like a lot of money now, but compare it to other figures of the day.  The National Wealth Estimate for the entire nation in 1856 was $12.3 billion ($12,396,000,000).  [Note:  All figures come from Tables in the cited U.S. Bureau of the Census publication.]  Total Bank Savings Deposits in 1856 was $95.6 million.  Manhattan Island, Land and Buildings were worth only $900 million dollars, less than one-fifth of the value invested in African-Americans.  The 1855 total capital and property investment in railroads was only $763.6 million dollars.   Why the $5 billion dollar investment in slaves?   In 1859, the total private production income was $4 billion dollars.  Of this total, labor-intensive industries like “agriculture” and “transportation and communication” accounted for $1.9 billion dollars, almost one-half of all total private income.  This explains why “a good field hand and laborer” would run you $1,550 for Big Fred aged 24 and $1,900 for George, a “No. 1 blacksmith”.  Men like these gave such a good return on the dollar that their owners would, and did, kill freely to keep the system in place. 
Africans in the Americas  Part 2
Part 1 of this series covered the earliest Africans to the Americas, both those caught in ocean currents flowing naturally to the Western Hemisphere, as well as the later African explorers who deliberately sought the new land.  The later importation of African as slaves to build the founding infrastructure of the United States and ended noting that slavery was the largest industry in the United States, with over 5 billion dollars invested.
The money earned from this investment found its way into a variety of banking institutions, which increased from 506 in 1834 to 1,643 in 1865.  Many of the names remain familiar to this day:  The Bank of New York Company, Inc. – founded in 1784,  Fleet National Bank – 1791, Chase Manhattan Corporation – 1799, Citicorp/Citibank N.A. -1812 , The Dime Savings Bank – 1859.    As banks in King Cottons’ “chief American market, that of New York,” it is inconceivable that these institutions, and through them the nation, did not benefit from the profits made on a slave’s wages.   Their business then, as it is now, was to be a source of funds to build empires in a variety of industries across the continent to make land purchases, upgrade equipment, save to send children to college, etc.   Railroads could be built using a combination of slave labor and loans taken at banks that held money on deposit from the cotton/slave industry.   Money was also paid to a variety of people who, while not slave owners themselves, were “in the loop” of payments for goods and services.  Thus were assets being used to develop the country for the benefit of  Europeans and their heirs.
Slavery is often looked at as a blot upon humanity rather than the business decision it is.  Africans have been presented as lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing, when the exact opposite was true.  We were a vital necessity to this nation.  Africans were the most valuable resource, our value on the open market dwarfed all other industries and values except for the land itself.   Historians talk about the Industrial Revolution starting in 18th century England, and the computer/information age of today.  Left out is the Slave Age, that period of the dark days of the golden age of white supremacy. This was the time when the United States, an emerging nation at the time, dealt most efficiently with a formidable problem: the supply and cost of manual labor.
At $865 billion a year, information technology represents about 12% of the 1997 Gross Domestic Product of $7,214 billion.  In 1805, slave labor represented as much as 20% of the national wealth.  By the 1850’s- ’60’s, that figure rose to as high as 40%.  If a 12% industry like information technology can affect the entire nation, how much impact does a 20-40% industry have?  Let’s take a look at the 1850’s and the effects of slave labor on the economy.
In his work, History of American Business & Industry, Alex Groner observes, “In the sense that they were large and complex-producing units, the big plantations were the South’s factories.  The hundreds of slaves included large numbers of production workers -the field hands- as well as such specialists and skilled artisans as carpenters, drovers, watchmen, coopers, tailors, millers, butchers, shipwrights, engineers, dentists and nurses.
Because virtually entire families could be put to work in the fields for most of the year, the slave economy proved ideal for cotton culture.  It was not only the plantations of the South but also the factories, shipping merchants and banks of the North whose economies became tied more and more closely to cotton.   What North and South had in common was the prosperity resulting from the growth of cotton production.  The size of the crop climbed steadily from 80 million pounds in 1815 to 460 million, or more than half the world’s output by 1834, and to more than a billion pounds by 1850…..From 1830 until the Civil War, cotton provided approximately half of the nation’s total exports. At an average of 400 man hours per 400 pound ginned bale of cotton (based on census averages), these billion pounds required a billion hours of unpaid man-hours.   These were supplied by African-American men, women and children working as slave labor under threat of torture and death. 
Thus produced, the cotton crop traded hands on exchanges like the largest one in New York.  Banks and other businesses participated in cotton transactions that were all handled as they usually are, for a fee.   And so the brokers, traders, lenders, etc., all profited first.  Then came the employees of the firms, the landlords, the washerwomen, the street vendors, messengers, haberdashers, milliners and all of their families, plus mortgage holders and service-providers in an ever-widening circle.

SLAVE CROPS TOTAL MORE THAN 60% OF  NATION’S EXPORTS
Now traded, cotton found its way to 25 of the 35 states and territories for manufacturing.  We don’t have to assume how the product was distributed, we can look at the 1850 list of cotton manufacturers.  (See U.S. Census Table CXCVL)   Here, we see there were 1,064 businesses directly employing over 92,000 people across the country.  Leading the way is Massachusetts, using 223,607 bales of cotton while employing over 29,000 people.  It is also interesting to note that the export of slave crops cotton, tobacco and rice totaled over 60% of all the nation’s exports.   This meant that the shipping industry, the dockworkers and the factories on both sides of the Atlantic all made a living from the peculiar institution of African-Americans working as slaves.   It was possible for people throughout Europe to work in cotton factories or peripheral industries in their home countries, save their money and book passage to America.  Here, the newly arrived immigrant could get off the boat, and work selling apples on Wall Street to the employees of the Cotton Exchange.  A seamstress from English mills could come and find work making dresses for the wives and mending the coats of the men who worked in the financial district.   Maybe you’ve heard stories like these before.   When an industry produces over 60% of the national exports, it reaches farther than can be seen from the docks or from the fields.  And there were other crops as well.  There were 2,681 sugar plantations and 8,327 hemp planters.   In 1850, there were over 20 million bushels of sweet potatoes, 3 million bushels of Irish potatoes, 7 million bushels of peas and beans, and 8 million pounds of wool, all produced in slave-holding states.  The African-Americans that Europeans called mere-do-well, helped clothe and feed this nation when it needed it most.   

GOVERNMENT PROFITS MOST
The government profited most of all.  The export of slave-produced crops allowed this emerging nation to import from the more industrialized countries (with tariffs applied) without incurring a trade deficit.    Also, slave-intensive industries such as agriculture, manufacturing and transportation comprised over 60% of the total private production income at the time.  In one way or another, this money was taxed.  The slaves themselves were taxable as property beginning in 1815.   The Federal Government profited by first placing a tax on the slave as a unit of property, and again when taxes were paid on the land the slaves improved.    Taxing authorities, whether federal or local, made their money at some point in the trading of cotton and again when salaries found their way into taxable areas.   The government uses a myriad of ways to raise the money it needs to do what it has to do – to build the infrastructure of the nation.   To build the roads, forts and pay the federal marshals.  This was done, in large parts, with slave dollars flowing like an irrigating stream, watering  national, state and local governments at various stops along the way.   And now today, the United States stands as a money pump with $7 trillion worth of pressure, creating jobs for Joe Blow in Idaho, and millionaires and billionaires with fortunes that span the globe.  But it is a pump that was primed with the blood of African and indigenous people. [1. The American Heritage History of American Business & Industry by Alex Groner and the Editors of American Heritage and Business Week. 1972]
Throughout all of the slave history of the United States, there were hundreds of known uprisings and rebellions.  A few of the best-known were the Gabriel Prosser and Jack Bowler Revolt of 1800 in Richmond, Virginia, the revolt led by Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in 1822 and the rebellion led by Nat Turner in 1831.  Africans continued to escape individually and in groups throughout the slave era.   Many went to Native American villages, others to Mexico, but most traveled the “Underground Railroad” to the Northern Free states, hiding in “stations” in cellars and barns of good people along the way.   Heroes abound during this period, but one who stands out is Harriet Tubman.   Ms. Tubman made nineteen trips leading over 300 people to freedom.   For stealing the property of the slave owners, a reward of $40,000 was placed on her capture, and that was when $40,000 was real money.  
There were many abolitionists working against slavery, but certainly the most courageous was John Brown.   So passionate was he that he led a force of nineteen men, including his five sons, and captured the government arsenal at  Harper’s Ferry in 1859.  His goal was to arm the slaves and begin a slave revolt that would spread through the South.   He was hanged for his efforts.   When it comes to passion about ending slavery, Abraham Lincoln was no John Brown.  At the height of the Civil War, and against his better judgment, President Lincoln was inexorably led to signing the Emancipation Proclamation.  As W. E. B. DuBois writes in Black Reconstruction, “It made no difference how much Abraham Lincoln might protest that this was not a war against slavery or ask General McDowell ‘if it would not be well to allow the armies to bring back those fugitive slaves which have crossed the Potomac with our troops (a communication which was marked ’secret’).’  It was in vain that Lincoln rushed entreaties and then commands to Fremont in Missouri, not to emancipate the slaves of rebels, and then had to hasten similar orders to Hunter in South Carolina.  The slave, despite every effort, was becoming the center of war….In August, Lincoln faced the truth, front forward; and that truth was not simply that Negroes ought to be free, it was that thousands of them were already free, and that either the power which slaves put into the hands of the South was to be taken from it, or the North could not win the war.  Either the Negro was to be allowed to fight or the draft itself would not bring enough white men into the Army to keep up the war.”  With thousands of Africans joining the battles, the Civil War was won by the Northern states.   As Abolitionist Wendell Phillips put it at a meeting in Faneuil Hall in Boston, “Gentlemen, you know very well that this nation called 4,000,000 of Negroes into citizenship to save itself.  (Applause).  It never called them for their own sakes.  It called them to save itself.”  (Cries of “Hear, Hear.”)
So now, grudgingly let free, the Africans entered a twenty-year period called Reconstruction.  This was a time when Africans, after having been freed, “turned out like cattle” is the phrase Professor Mackey uses, the Africans again displayed the same self-help ethic that had empowered those Northern Africans who had formed associations, built businesses and churches.   Africans began to form towns, till land and raise families for the first time.  They did this while contending with things like the Black Codes which were as DuBois says, “representing the logical result of attitudes of mind existing when Lincoln still lived…In all cases, there was a plain and indisputable attempt on the part of the Southern states to make Negroes slaves in everything but name.”    In addition to the laws, Africans had to contend with bands of murdering white terrorists who killed Black people at will.   Gradually, over the decades, as the killings subsided and Africans continued to come together, there was born a civil rights movement and the right to vote. Professor John Henrik Clarke says, “One of the distinguishing features of the civil rights movement was continuation of the sense of racial unity and impatience in African-Americans.”    The anger began to erupt in the street rebellions of the 60’s.  These were first met with troops and tanks and then with a Counterintelligence Program.  Known as COINTELPRO, this operation combined city, state and federal law enforcement agencies in a joint effort to destroy the increasingly militant activism of the African-American community. Groups like the Black Panther Party were infiltrated and destroyed.  Misinformation was sown and African-American dissenters treated by law enforcement agencies in the same way as dissenters are in any country with very strict rules for minority peoples and dissenting opinions.  They were murdered in their beds as in the case of Fred Hampton in Chicago, shot down in the street, cornered in houses and jailed on false charges.   This history continues to live in prisons where many of those politically active Africans are still held today. 
One of the things that may have been learned by COINTELPRO operatives was that African-Americans are an unusually resilient and community-centered people.  That they have a legacy of spirituality and self-help.   It was during this time that drug use began to grow in the African-American community.  If you want to know where in the world the drugs at the corner were coming from, look to where in the world the CIA was active. In the Sixties, the heroin epidemic came in from CIA cohorts in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. This is extensively documented in Al McCoy’s book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.
Going into minute detail, McCoy shows how the CIA’s connection with its covert allies led directly to the heroin epidemic of the 1960’s. The crack explosion coincided with the CIA’s work on behalf of the Reagan Administration in support of the Nicaraguan Contras in the mid-eighties. In Dark Alliance, investigative reporter Gary Webb reveals the connections between the Contras, the CIA and the crack epidemic of the 1980’s.   In one instance, one man, Danilo Blandon, a CIA “asset”, was reported to have brought in (“easily”) 55 tons of cocaine between 1980 and 1991.   This is only one man making deliveries destined for African-American communities.  This is not seepage through the borders.   These are packing crates and duffel bags targeted at selected communities.   There is the old saw in the major media that whatever CIA involvement there was, was by “rogue officers.” But that’s not the case at all.   Recently, convicted traitors Aldrich Aimes and Harold Nicholson were rogue officers. We know this because they were put under surveillance, captured and imprisoned. The “rogue” officers and “assets” who conducted, condoned, protected or supplied the drug-running into the African-American communities of the United States were either paid government salaries for their work, or were allowed to profit from their drug-dealing in return for doing national security favors for the CIA.   It is not difficult to believe that one of those favors was to keep the African-American communities disrupted and demoralized.
Next Week:
Dr. Amos Wilson on Conscousness
Dr Joy DeGruy Leary on Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder.

NOTES FROM DAKAR- Scholars Send a Message to the World From Brooklyn

It was Super Bowl Sunday, but that was of no matter to the illustrious group assembled to celebrate the life of the great Senegalese historian, Cheikh Anta Diop on the 24th Anniversary of his death. Revered historian of the Nile Valley civilizations, Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan was there with his wife, Sister Khepra, co-founder of the First World Alliance, a “communiversity” as Dr. Leonard Jeffries, also present, had christened it. African-centered musician Randy Weston and his wife and others had the privilege of hearing Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi, the translator of Diop’s masterwork, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology, speak on the importance of Cheikh Anta Diop today.

“His life’s work was to free his people. To give back to Africa the legacy that is Africa.” Ngemi said that Civilization or Barbarism was the book where Diop put together his lifetime’s research. “Diop believed there had to be a change in the African mentality on the continent. In the introduction he says that ‘Imperialism, like a prehistoric monster, first kills the being culturally, spiritually and intellectually before killing us physically. In the denial of the intellectual accomplishments of our ancestors was the cultural and mental death that preceded and paved the way for our physical death both on the continent and throughout the Diaspora.” Ngemi says that Diop made it his purpose to rediscover that knowledge of the ancestors. “Because without it we cannot redefine ourselves worldwide.”
After Ngemi finished the translation, he started to teach about Diop and found that most of the people, people of the Diaspora, did not know Diop’s name. “Cheikh Anta Diop is on a different level spiritually, culturally, and he was a man ahead of his time.” Ngemi refers to Diop’s 1960 work, Black Africa the Economic and Cultural basis for an African State, where Diop contended that Africa had the resources the world wanted and Africa could not only develop itself and compete with the rest of the world, “There is room for all of the Diaspora to return.”
“In this little booklet Diop prophesized as to what was the main problem about us as a people,” said Ngemi. “Diop writes, speaking of his own generation, ‘Historical circumstances now commands of our generation, that it solve, in an expeditious manner, the vital problems that face Africa, most especially, the cultural problem. If we do not succeed in this, we will appear in the history of the development of our people as the watershed generation that was unable to ensure the unified cultural survival of the African continent. We will be the generation which out of political and intellectual blindness, committed the error fatal to our national future.’ That’s what Diop wrote in 1960.”
And here we are, some 50 years later and Ngemi says that cultural identity, which Diop identified as what unites an entire people, “is still what is besetting us. On the continent and in the Diaspora.” Speaking of his own country Congo, Zaire, he said that 10 million have been killed since 1996. “10 million. They continue to die as I speak here. Little girls as young as 9 years old being gang-raped by other Black people, Africans, in Africa, on the African continent. 10 million. Why? Lack of cultural identity.”
Ngemi says that reading Diop’s work has an altering effect, and that there is “a birth of a new person after reading Diop’s work,” and learning “what the world owes to your ancestral genius.”
Easter is still two months away, but a Resurrection is what Ngemi says is the responsibility of conscious African people. “We have to resurrect our people. We have to deliver. Because if we’ve been killed, culturally, intellectually, spiritually, we have to be reborn in order to free ourselves.”
And he says until the masses of people can be resurrected and achieve rebirth, then African people on the continent and throughout the Diaspora “will continue to navigate this blankness of mental slavery. Slavery of the spirit, slavery of culture.”
When Ngemi spoke about the problems with the education system in African nations, he could have been speaking of Bedford-Stuyvesant schools as well. “Africans experience problems today because Diop is not being taught in schools in Senegal,” or in the Congo he says. “Go and see the curriculum in Senegal, or all over Africa. It is still a colonial curricula.” A curriculum that does not teach of the time before this time, before the colonial control and influence over the education. It is the contention of Mr. Ngemi, Diop and the others, that it is that knowledge, that will set the African free, at home and throughout the Diaspora, even here in Brooklyn.

Update and More on MacDonough St. Landmarks

Two weeks ago, the Department of Buildings (DOB)determined that renovation work performed in the cellar of 329 McDonough Street by ANC Construction, a contractor hired by the building owner, undermined the shared party wall between 329 and 331 McDonough Street causing it to partially collapse on Wednesday morning, January 20.
DOB engineers immediately determined that the damage to the party wall compromised the structural stability of both buildings and created a “perilous” public safety hazard. According to DOB spokesperson Ryan Meredith Fitzgibbon, “The contractors dug a ravine next to the party wall causing instability.”
DOB vacated 329 and 331 McDonough Street because they said damage posed a risk to the lives of the tenants and the property owners.
Rumors were rampant that the bookend buildings 327 (with four condo owners) and 333 (vacant and up for sale) might be adversely impacted if 329 and 331 were demolished, as noted in postings.
· Property owners of 327, 329 and 331 joined forces with engineers and lawyers to sue to stop the demolition, and show the properties can be saved. The plaintiffs include: the owner of 329 MacDonough St., Robert Providence; 327 Mac-Donough LLC; and owner of 331, Doreen Prince.
Meanwhile, last week, the plaintiffs’ engineers submitted a plan to pour concrete in the basement for shoring. The DOB reviewed the plan and determined “it was comprehensive and safe,” according to Fitzgibbon. Last Friday 29, DOB allowed the engineers to have the work done.
· On Tuesday, February 2, Supreme Court Justice Bert Bunyan extended a stay on demolition until Monday, February 8 to allow further time for submission for a shoring and bracing plan that would pass DOB approval. Announced Fitzgibbon yesterday, “The buildings are being closely monitored, and there are no signs of movement at this time,” adding, “The owner of 329 McDonough Street is currently working with his engineer to develop a plan to salvage the buildings.”
Joining block residents in the courtroom on February 2 were Borough President Marty Markowitz and City Councilman Al Vann (D-Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights). Both, it was learned, had monitored the MacDonough Street situation and had been in conversations with City Buildings officials – Vann, from out of the country — since reports of the crisis two weeks ago.
The View From There
Krystal Coddett’s window has a view of two of Brooklyn’s loveliest landmarks: the great stained-glass window of St. Philips Church , itself a home to one of the nation’s most precious legacies — a history that embraces the Brownstones, some unchanged in their century of existence, and a section of the village of Bedford Stuyvesant’s ancestral roots.

Before the lofty term gentrification collapsed into a racial pejorative during the late 80’s meaning wealthy people purchasing properties mainly for cheap in poorer areas, there was another wave of gentrification, this involved aristocracies of color from the Caribbean and the South who purchased properties along MacDonough, Macon, Decatur, Bainbridge, Stuyvesant, Lewis and other blocks.
In appreciation and respect for the natural woods, and the artistry and craftsmanship, detailingslargely remained unharmed by most of these property owners.
As Tremaine Wright, owner of Common Ground café on Tompkins Avenue, and heir to a legacy of longtime brownstoners on Jefferson Avenue, “They held on to the real estate, so the next generations would not have to launch from the starting line. They worked hard, maintained and did their business.”
MacDonough Street former resident Mother Singleton, the late Bridge Street Church icon, who owned several properties, created a “museum” in her MacDonough St. home base with artifacts from her lifelong journey. She probably knew the parents of community organizer Sam Pinn who residents, with his wife, Doris, in the same MacDonough brownstone that his ancestors purchased in 1929.
Pinn, in a recent interview with Our Time Press, recalled watching Junior High School 35 going up in stages right across the street from his house, where beautiful brownstones once stood. There’s now a Brownstone School, there, and the nearby Brownstone Books, owned by McDonough resident Crystal Bobb-Semple and her husband Walter, MacDonough Street homeowners.
Before the Pinns, a young Lena Horne walked down MacDonough to get to the Macon Library, one block over. Her father owned a store near there, and she grew up in a house in the Weeksville area, an area coming back to life due to work of the late Joan Maynard and the current executive director of the Weeksville Heritage Center, Pam Greene. The Center, on Bergen, is about to build the first “green” museum devoted exclusively to an African-American village.
Pre-Civil War Weeksville’s ancestral connection to Bedford-Stuyvesant reminds that the community’s roots did not begin with the textbook description of the migration of people of color to the area during the 1920’s or just a few years earlier. In the early 19th century, black stevedore James Weeks purchased land from the Lefferts family, and started a self-contained village from the ground up. In doing so he began the pathway that ambled down a Native American trail into what is now Stuyvesant Heights, where eventually Miles Davis and Max Roach jammed in a forgotten after hours spot; “Native Son” author Richard Wright’s secretary, Mrs. Leach, according to Ms. Maynard, typed his manuscripts; Thomas Russell Jones and Elsie Richardson motivated Robert Kennedy to “restore” the neighborhood; the founder of the first magazine devoted solely to Black business, and Richard D. Parsons, the current CEO of Citigroup, were raised, and so on.
And all who are associated with 329 and 331, and their bookends 327 and 333, are part of the history and the soul of that area. Their stories, too, are about utilizing all of the talents and skills they have to survive, and the strength to prevent two strong village teeth to be yanked from their sockets. If possible.
When the residents of 329 and 331 evacuated their space on Wednesday morning of January 20, they fully expected to soon return home. They were at first told it would be a few hours. Then, later that morning, they were assured it would be a a few days before they would be able to go back. So they went to bed Wednesday night without the benefit of the small luxuries that come from having a place to be and call your own, and the belongings that come with it. There was no reason to believe that they and their things would not be safe and sound, or that the crisis in the cellar discovered by Mrs. Prince early Wednesday morning was over for them. On Thursday morning, they carried on: went to work, shopped for clothes, searched for avenues to access accounts. After all, backpacks, IDs, passports were in “safe places” – at home. Thursday they repeated the routine of Wednesday, with some uncertainty and a great deal of discomfort with their displacement.
By Thursday afternoon, texting, emails and phone calls reached them wherever they were staying, working or trying to make a way. Postings had gone up; 329 and 331 houses would be demolished; rumors flashed that 327 and 333 might be impacted.
Architect Michael McCaw, who has an office in the area, and designed plans for the upper floors — not the cellar — of 329, heard the news, and reacted swiftly placing a call to Henry Butler, chair of Community Board III. CB3 district manager Charlene Phillips dashed off a stunner of an email to various organizations and to Our Time Press; we had just completed the distribution work on the day’s issue. When we arrived on the block people were reeling, as we were, about this life-changing announcement.
329 owner Doreen Prince kept vigil from a van as demolition companies, apparently learning of the news showed up to survey the houses and place bids on the demolition work. One hurt bystander said, “They were like vultures circling a dying corpse!” “It’s all about money,” others opined, after learning later that an out-of-borough contractor erected the wood partition barring the entry to the buildings and protecting pedestrians from any falling debris, earned, “$4,000, more or less” for the job. That partition would be moved closer to the curb, twice over the course of a few days.
“I think if they were in a different neighborhood there’d be a much greater effort (to find an alternative to demolition),” said another. Nobody knew what was really going on, how could they? But all agreed there was an alternative to tearing down, and wondered why they did not have a say in discussing another way. But they said these things in shock, more than anger.
Alan Greaves, Mrs. Prince’s son, who with Krystal Coddett, would lead the effort to find out what was going on and, then, what to do, later said, “We had no time for anger, blaming, criticizing or hysteria. Tearing down the buildings was not an option. But we knew we had very little time to devise a course of action; we had to be clear about what to do.”
But Alan, a fire safety official, also knew something else: while carpenters, contractors, plumbers huddled on MacDonough Street in discussions on how the buildings could be shored, he knew that his and their opinions and solutions didn’t matter unless they could be proved in a courtroom. He silently began to work on a plan and consult with his associates in Downtown Brooklyn at Metro Tech.
By late Thursday night, the shockwave had reached area politicians working in Albany; Councilman Vann who was out of the country; and more community groups. Behind the scenes, they all geared up to have a hand – if not a say – in preserving the buildings. Evelyn Collier, President of the MacDonough Street Block Association, was on the phone with Borough President Marty Markowitz; Vann talked to commissioners and deployed staff members James Crandle, Carl Luciano and other to get on the street; the Brownstoners of Bedford Stuyvesant were mobilizing to have a presence in force at the hearing they were told was to take place the next day, then the day after that; and CB3 was fielding calls and informing its community advocates, who in turn reached to the highest rungs in the city to get the information needed to put wheels in motion carefully and stealthily.
And the people’s movement had only just begun. If Coddett’s home was the nerve center, then area businesses were her satellites, including Brownstone Books, Bread Stuy Café, the CB3 office, Peaches Restaurant. Everyone was aligned – as McDonough Street homeowner Daphne Daniel said, “to work through the system to save legacies.”
In this week’s Community Board 3 meeting, Vann said, “The people on the block should be commended for pulling together and we should recognize, as well, the support from various organizations. And Justice (Bert Bunyan) is being fair; we can never underestimate the total benefit when people come from the community.”
At the hearing on February 2, Vann and Markowitz blended in with the people of McDonough Street and their supporters.
In an e-mail, educator and community leader Brenda Fryson, former chair of the Community Board 3, wrote: “The heart of the story is of a community pulling together around a crisis.  Folks took off from work and other things to pack the courtroom to show support; others stood vigil on MacDonough Street, some worked behind the scenes to provide technical assistance.  This is the true spirit of Bed-Stuy.  The story is not finished.”
With the next hearing set for February 8, Our Time Press, in its February 11 issue, continues this journey.

Community Action Forces Illegal Shelter to Close

Community Board 3, Small Businesses, Residents, Block Presidents Take Back Malcolm X Blvd.

A victory took place in Bedford-Stuyvesant this week. Residents, merchants, civic leaders and elected officials joined forces to express their concerns about a rehabilitation center that covertly moved into the area in the beginning of January. Standing in solidarity, the collective succeeded in forcing the Gelzer Foundation, that ran a temporary housing facility for recovering alcohol and drug addicts, at 332 Malcolm X Blvd. out of the neighborhood.

After a weeklong battle, neighbors were thrilled to learn that the beat-up van that dropped off the wayward clan returned to reclaim the bed frames and mattresses it left behind. Earlier in the month, members of the community met with two representatives from the Gelzer Foundation. Unfortunately, the meeting only raised more questions and suspicions about how this organization, which apparently receives some city funding and holds no certificate with the state, was able to enter a neighborhood undetected.
After the request for a second meeting and documentation of the agency’s legitimacy was declined, the collective swung into action. True to the time in which we live in, there were no picket signs or bull horns demanding justice. Instead, the fight played out in cyberspace with e-mail campaigns fired off at jet speed to elected officials and civic leaders; and numerous blog postings and text messages soliciting support. New York Daily News, Our Time Press, the Real Deal Newspaper and News 12 covered the action; phone calls were placed to the agency, forcing elected officials to take action. By Friday, the Gelzer Foundation had enough and permanently closed its doors.
Program housing is a major concern in Bedford-Stuyvesant and other low-income communities throughout the city. Although the city and state has placed a “fair share clause” which monitors the number of program agencies committed to one region, developers and venture capitalists are able to exploit the lucrative market by secretly setting up such agencies in privately owned homes.
Community Board 3, which meets regularly with several city agencies during its closed-session meetings, promises to address the issue in a public forum soon. Chairman Henry Butler commended Bainbridge Street & Malcolm X Blvd. , Block Association and the Malcolm X Merchants Association for their unwavering commitment in tackling the issue noting that it was the community’s acting in the early stages that made the difference.

BSVAC Welcomes Back First-Responders, Readies Second Wave

 ”When we got to the hospital the first thing was to see patients.  Some of them were crying and screaming.  We were working since then, nonstop,” said Poucheralph Salomon, a member of the 44-person medical delegation of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps that was on the ground Saturday after the Tuesday earthquake.   “I’m a Haitian immigrant who came here in 1998, and I’m an American and I was proud to get down there and be able to help my people.” When they slept it was on the floor of a nearby house and then they were back surrounded by the sounds of pain and the smell of blood and death, giving their food to the patients. “I feel like I’m still in Haiti right now.” 

Mr. Salomon was speaking in an interview after a press conference welcoming the returning volunteers, and introducing the second wave of volunteers going to Haiti.  At the conference Congressman Ed Towns said, “I was watching television and when the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps marched off the plane I had such a fantastic feeling that Bedford-Stuyvesant was there.”  The congressman said he thought back to when he first met with Commander Rocky Robinson when Robinson was working out of the second floor of an abandoned building that was next to the current location.  “I remember when I went up to that second floor and it was raining inside the building.  When I left I said I’m going to help him but that man must have lost his mind to go into a building like that and talk about starting an ambulance corps.”

Acknowledging the power of a dream, Towns said, “As a result of your involvement here in Bedford-Stuyvesant,  Bedford-Stuyvesant went to Haiti and saved lives.  Within 24 hours, they delivered 23 babies. They were able to relieve pain and suffering.   This is what it is all  about – people who help people.” 

After the press conference Robinson spoke to the congressman of the kind of work they are doing in Haiti, saying of a CNN report, “They showed our dog, we have a dog, Cassius, named after Cassius Clay before he became Muhammad Ali, and he discovered the man in the hole.  And that’s our people pulling him out.  So we’re not only in the hospital, we have a small rescue team that’s saving lives.”

Dr. Roger St. Louis, one of the second wave of volunteers headed to Haiti as a member of the Ambulance Corps, said that the medical care must continue or more will die.  “Here’s the reason why.  We need orthopedics, anesthesiologists and surgeons on the first blow, and now it’s infections that are going to spread and kill people.”   Dr. St. Louis  emphasized the need for ongoing care, and the risk of gangrene setting into untreated wounds.  

“They need antibiotics, they need an arrangement where they can heal.  We believe that our first need will be healing the wounds and healing the infections.”
Another volunteer is Khadijah Shakur, a registered nurse since 1986.  A specialist in obstetrics and orthopedics, Shakur couldn’t sleep well in the aftermath of the quake. “So when I heard that the Ambulance Corps was looking for volunteers, I immediately came.  I felt I have to help my people.”  Even though she will be leaving soon, Khadijah says she is “restless and anxious because there are things that are needed down there.  Infection is running rampant and we need to be there and lay hands on these people.  They need doctors, nurses and physical therapists.  We have to get on the ground to help our people out.” 

Volunteer Dr. Gaston Valcin emphasized the emotional and psychological support  that is also needed.  “The Haitian people need counseling because so many are in shock right now.”  Asked how they could give up practices and go,  Dr. Hans Garry Torlan  said, “We’re natives of Haiti.  Haiti is our heart.  We put everything aside.”
Also, said Dr. St. Louis,  President Martin of Kings County Hospital is giving “lots of leeway” and providing opportunities, including a department where staff can register to go help in Haiti.    “Kings County is helping 110% in this catastrophic problem.”

Looking over where the BSVAC has come in the last twenty-two years, Robinson said, “Before, we were only the EMTs and paramedics, and now doctors and nurses are coming on board because they believe in what we’re doing.   I get calls from as far away as Georgia and Florida.  We’re galvanizing the Haitian community, the Caribbean community, the African-American community and even the Jewish community is having a dance for us on Monday.  People are really getting on board, but we are the leaders.  We have to lead the way.”  David Mark Greaves

MacDonough Street Buildings Still Stand

New York City is a mosaic of stories.  And one of the most heartrending  yet heartwarming  can be seen in action on MacDonough Street, between Lewis and Stuyvesant Avenue in historic Stuyvesant. 
It began early Wednesday morning, January 20, when Mrs. Doreen Prince, owner of 331 MacDonough, awoke and could not go back to sleep. 
She got up to get a glass of water, and when she returned to bed, she smelled gas.  She went back to the kitchen and then decided to check the boiler. As she opened the door to the basement, the gas odor was powerful. 
She looked down the stairs, and saw the wall her building shared with 329 was now mostly a mountain of rubble and brick.  She could see into neighbor Robert Providence’s house through the gaping hole.   Even at that point it did not hit her how dangerous the situation was.  Stunned, she could only think of alerting her tenants and Mr. Providence next door.  But what was to develop into a nightmare unfolded very quickly. Within hours, it was determined that the two buildings were in eminent danger of collapsing under 100 tons of weight, that Mrs. Prince and her tenants, who left the building only with the clothes on their backs and their keys to the house, could not return. Ever.  The building would be demolished.   There were rumors the adjacent buildings sandwiching 331 and 329 might also be razed.
And the story had only just begun.
The buildings were slated to go down on Thursday in compliance with Buildings Department regulations concerning public safety.  And the tenants were restricted from entering the building to retrieve their belongings.
On Thursday, Mr. Providence secured a stay so the buildings would not be torn down.  On Friday another stay was granted until Monday.  On Monday, a stay until yesterday, January 27 when Justice Bert Bunyan ruled that  property owners’ structural engineers could have until Tuesday, February 2 to come up with a viable plan to save the structures.

It’s a story of people working together to find solutions; it is a story of compassion; it is a story where there are no enemies; it is a story about being on the brink; it is a story about “stuff;” keeping legacies alive, heritage intact and the quest to build new foundations; and more than bricks and mortar, it is ultimately the story, said 331 renter, Omalara Reginald Rose Deas, of grace under pressure. “And people.”

Two of those people were Lieselle Pascal, Mr. Rose’s neighbor, and Mr. Tim Lynch, a buildings forensic expert.  Mr. Lynch personally brought the tenants’ and Mrs. Prince belongings out of the building.  The very first items came from Miss Pascal’s apartment.

The cardboard box Lynch thought Miss Pascal requested contained the bible her grandmother had given her 10 years ago.  
Keedra Gibba of the December 12 Movement was seated comfortably in Bread Stuy Caf‚ at about 1pm, Friday (22), when 327 McDonough Street condo owner Suzette Hunte, entered and implored diners to come out to the  hearing that was taking place in an hour. Gibbs, without hesitation, responded to Miss Hunte’s “call to action.”

And then there are Krystal Coddett, Crystal Bobb-Semple, Eddie and Bea Atwell, Daniel and Jordana Rosen, Michael Charles, Doris Pinn, Dan Durett, Councilwoman Tish James, Kenny Kweku, Frantz, and Alan Greaves, Mrs. Prince’s son and stalwart protector — all playing a part in the drama.
The Department of Buildings told Our Time Press, “The stay on demolition has been extended to Tuesday, February 2. The buildings are being closely monitored, and there are no signs of movement at this time. The property owner will continue to submit monitoring reports to the Department. Meanwhile, the property owner (Robert Providence) must submit plans to the Department that show how the buildings can be stabilized.”  The results of the Tuesday hearing will be reported – and some of the individuals who brought the MacDonough Street story to this point will be introduced — next week in Our Time Press.

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