NAACP Raises Alarm Over Growing Cases of AIDS in African-American Communities: Poverty, Lack of Health Care Causes Disproportionate Rate Amongst African-Americans

Washington- In observance of World AIDS Day, December 1st, the NAACP stands united in the global fight against HIV and AIDS.  The World Health Organization established World AIDS Day in 1988 to provide national AIDS programs, faith organizations, community organizations and individuals with an opportunity to raise awareness and focus attention on the global AIDS epidemic.
NAACP chapters and branches across the country, including California, New York, Michigan, Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and Texas will use World AIDS Day 2010 as a day to highlight the AIDS issue in their communities and will host a number of community events including community-wide forums, education sessions and free screenings. In addition, the NAACP is working to mobilize pastors in states with the highest concentration of HIV-infected African-Americans to have open discussions about the HIV epidemic and direct parishioners to services in their communities.
HIV and AIDS has hit African-Americans the hardest, shattering families and destroying lives.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cite the reasons for the racial disparity as not just related to race, but rather to barriers faced by many African-Americans. These barriers include poverty, access to health care and the social stigma associated with HIV/AIDS.
“We must not forget the devastating effects HIV/AIDS has on communities of color across this country,” stated NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “That is why the NAACP has partnered with a number of national organizations and our local units to put a stop to the ‘forgotten epidemic’. The NAACP is committed to being a major force behind the education of communities and a strong advocate for better health services and HIV/AIDS testing. Knowledge is the first step to better health and access to services is critical if we are to overcome this crisis,” concluded Jealous.
Even though Blacks account for about 13 percent of the US population, they are almost half (49 percent) of the people living with HIV and AIDS. African-Americans represent 51 percent of the 42,655 (including children) new HIV/AIDS diagnoses and 48 percent of the 551,932 persons, including children, living with HIV. AIDS is the leading cause of death among Black women ages 25-34 and the second leading cause of death in Black men ages 35-44 years. 1 in 30 Black women and 1 in 16 Black men will be infected with HIV in their lifetime.
“It is staggering to think that a group of people that makes up only 13 percent of the country’s population includes over half of the newly diagnosed HIV-infected individuals each year,” stated Roslyn M. Brock, NAACP Chairman of the National Board of Directors. “The uneven distribution of HIV infections indicates that there are specific challenges faced by the African-American community that are resulting in an astronomical increase in the rate at which African-Americans contract the HIV virus,” concluded Brock.
The NAACP is also a partner with the Act Against AIDS Leadership Initiative (AAALI) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health and Gilead Sciences.
Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.

Response to a Reader

To the Editor:
I love the Bedford-Stuyvesant community. My family and I are newcomers and would like for our local politicians to stop using and abusing the words “black community”.  Yes, we know Bed-Stuy is mostly black, but that will not be the case for very long. We wish you would include others like Hispanics, whites, Asians as well when it comes time to speak about improving the community. We are all doing what we can in these tough times.
This community will come to fruition when all people are mentioned as an important part of this community. We live in New York City, a place surrounded by all different groups, does Al Vann really believe Bed-Stuy will continue to be mostly a black community.
Wake up sir, we all care about the neighborhood and want to live next to decent people without regard to their racial makeup. When you mention the fact that blacks can’t let go of Bedford-Stuyvesant, you create tension between different groups.
That is not what our politicians should be doing. Why not just refer to all community members of Bed-Stuy simply as that, because that is what we are.
Steven,
Brooklyn

Dear Steven,
As far I can tell, you do not love the Bedford Stuyvesant community.  What you love about Bedford-Stuyvesant are its amenities: the transportation infrastructure, the tree-lined streets, the brownstones.   There is the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and the Brooklyn Museum all within a nice walk, that is what you love.  The inhabitants, however, are an entirely different matter.
Bedford-Stuyvesant has had many ethnicities passing through it over the years.  Now  it is a mostly African-American community with roots stretching back over two hundred years, the Weeksville Houses, still standing, date from 1840.  Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in 1766, incorporated in 1818.  So yes, that sentence fragment was right, you are newcomers.  Beyond that, you suffer from what we can call Post-Traumatic Slave State Syndrome (PTSSS).
Dr. Joy DeGruy has written about Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the transgenerational transfer of emotional trauma arising out of  the terror needed to hold African-Americans in chattel slavery for 400 years.    This period also produced a state apparatus as well as a state of consciousness in European-Americans arising out of  hundreds of years of superiority and of relating to African-Americans as property.  What you are experiencing here is an example of PTSSS, a condition brought on by vestiges of slavery that are with us every day.
For example.  There are weekly and daily publications in many languages all around you, all referring to their “community” of Polish-Americans, Russian-Americans, Korean-Americans, Pakistani-Americans and many more.  They are of  no interest to you because you do not speak their language.   And if Our Time Press was written in Swahili, you would also pay it no mind.  It is written in English because Africans were captured, transported as cargo and sold as property to provide the cheap mass labor needed to convert raw land into the economic engine that jump-started this United States.
As a part of that, the slave system took away the languages of the Africans and substituted its own, giving slave owners access and control over the Africans’ thoughts.  And now, as you continue that legacy of eavesdropping, you are overcome with umbrage that the property has misbehaved, but you take a gleeful solace in projecting that we won’t be here very much longer.
It is impossible to know which of the echoes of slavery you feel will take us out but given the combination and the multitude I can understand your feeling of confidence.   There are the foreclosures resulting from racist predatory lending driving people from their homes and depression-era unemployment plus a 50% dropout rate, all intertwined with emotional distress, most obviously acted out in self-hating crimes of gunfire and dysfunction at home.
As African-Americans work to cure these problems, you feel empowered to object, which were it not for the PTSSS diagnosis, would be an astonishing impertinence.   But I guess such malevolent arrogance is not unexpected, and the rewards for stealing another’s language, the ability to meddle, keep coming in.
Of course you are right again, it is nice to live next door to decent people.  A person I would have liked to have lived next to was the family of Louisa May Alcott.  In the biography Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, Harriet Reisen writes this about the capture of Louisa’s family hero, the militant abolitionist John Brown: “We are boiling with excitement here,” Louisa wrote to Alf Whitman a few weeks after the raid, “for many of our people (Anti Slavery, I mean) are concerned in it.  We have a daily stampede for papers, and a nightly indignation meeting of the wickedness of our country & the cowardice of the human race.  I’m afraid mother will die of spontaneous combustion if things are not set right soon.”   And later, after a harrowing description of Louisa’s experiences in a Civil War hospital was this: “The night before she had celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation by leaping from her bed at midnight and racing to the window to add her own cheer to the hollering and singing in the streets of the embattled nation’s capital.  She waved her handkerchief to a crowd of black men gathered below, and returned to bed to savor the bursts of firecrackers and choruses of ‘Glory, Hallelujah’ that sounded all night.”  These passages and many others show me that Miss Alcott and her people, “Anti Slavery, I mean”, are people I’d like to live next to.  And I know their descendants and legacies are here also, luckily offsetting those such as yourself.
(It would be better if abolitionist fire still burned with indignation, decrying white control of African-American education and demanding fairness in city contracting, but the vote for Obama showed there were still some embers there and maybe they just have to be fanned.)
You, however, are a different matter.  Your words on African-Americans remaining in Bedford-Stuyvesant, “that will not be the case very long,” spring from a different source, one captured by Claude McKay in his poem “The Lynching”:

Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced ’round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

And here you are, the little lads’ heir all grown-up and smugly snuggled in your white privilege, a critic of African-American conversations to combat the remains of the slave experience, strengthen our community and be a full partner in the future.
The fact that you find the methods and manner objectionable is heartening, I take it to mean we are on the right track, and as a sort of mile marker on our journey I ask a favor of you please, let us know when you become apoplectic, then we’ll know we’re almost there.

Asthma Self-Help for African-Americans

Asthma in the African-American child may be caused by things other than what is commonly suggested.  In many African-American homes sometimes we do things that others might not be doing, such as burning incense.  Incense has a flux that comes off like any burning weed or leaf and that might be causing a child to have asthma.  So I would advise anybody that has asthmatic children, not to burn any of those types of things in their homes.  The roach is a big problem because the exoskeleton comes off and disintegrates into a protein dust which is highly allergenic.  Mite dust is another problem.   In your mattress, there are mites that eat the dead skin that flakes off your body.  These mites defecate and their waste is called mite dust.  Every time you roll over in a mattress, that dust comes up.  So people should really spend more money replacing mattresses than on doctor visits and medicines. 
Also, the residual remains of roach bombs does not easily dissipate, particularly in the winter when everything is closed up to keep the heat in.  Everything else stays as well.   If you also use a gas stove to heat a house, you get a lot of non-combustibles coming in, carbon dioxide, things like that, and you run the danger of creating a negative pressure in the house.  This negative pressure can draw gases back down a flue, gases that should be released to the outside.  This is how many people get carbon monoxide poisoning.   This is very common, and yet it gets treated as though it were the flu or some kinds of upset stomach, or headache you think is do to a cold. 
When you bring your clothing home from the dry cleaner, air it out well before you bring it into your closet.  Because perchloroethylene is a very toxic chemical.  
In African-American homes, we use a lot of disinfectants, pine and different kinds of detergents and cleaners.  Any of these aerosol products that have aromas, floral scents, should not be used in the home around children.  There are many chemicals in the spray system of the can.
Of course, there should be no smoking in a house with children.  No smoking at all.   A baby=s lungs are very sensitive and susceptible to damage from cigarette smoke.  There is not one thing in the diet that can=t cause asthma.  You can have asthma from eating one type of food.  I had a patient who went to see her daughter at college, and she went into a little restaurant and had some chili, without knowing they had used peanuts in the preparation.   She ate it and died from an asthmatic attack. 
One of the biggest things found now in many foods is sulfite.  We have something in our bodies called sulfite oxidase which can oxidize the sulfite when it comes into our bodies.  But that enzyme system is limited in the amount of work it can do.  When it gets overloaded the system shuts down and you end up with a lot of sulfites moving through your body causing difficulty.  Researchers have found that you can protect the sulfite oxidase by using vitamin B-12.  If you look in any allergy journal sulfites is high on the list.  In fact, they have outlawed sulfites on store lunch counters, where they were used to keep the vegetables looking fresh.  Sulfites are used mostly for cosmetic purposes.  They keep tuna fish white, and the fruint in fruitcake  red, orange, pink or yellow.  Dried fruits have to be sulfited to keep their color.  White raisins are kept white by sulfites. 
A big problem that children have is with the sulfites in the quarter-water drinks.  If you go into the average Bodega and you=ll find a wide variety of these drinks, and many with sulfites.  These sulfites can build up in the body and constrict the small bronchi leading into air sacs of the lungs, triggering an asthmatic attack.   These drinks also cause hyperactivity in children because of the intense fructose that=s in it.  It intoxicates the brain.  Then there are also dyes they have put in these things to hold the color.  So the result is a variety of chemicals going into your body that the body was never designed to handle and can=t even recognize.  Give your children juices instead of the colored water drinks.  Read the labels carefully.  If this was done, it would reduce asthma as much as one-quarter. 
These drugs that are used to treat asthma are horrible.   They make children nervous, and upset, and prevent them from functioning well in school.   The pharmaceutical companies do produce some lifesaving products, but they are also profit-making enterprises, manufacturing products which they recommend be used daily.  These companies are not necessarily the best source of information on how  to prevent asthma in a more natural and safe way.   Examine everything you take into your body and remove those things that have asthma-causing properties.   Be aware of your environment and of the air quality around you.  An air purifier can have a very beneficial effect for asthmatics.    and don=t forget, consult with your allergist or doctor before changing or discontinuing any medication.

View From Here: The Freedom Party – Waking Giant

“Say it loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud!” When we entered the Siloam Presbyterian Church, whose 161 year-old history includes the congregation taking up a $25 collection for the visiting John Brown on his way to Harper’s Ferry, the beat of James Brown was reverberating from the large meeting room up the stairs and over the Sanctuary. There we were engulfed by the heat of over 250 pulsating souls charged with the electricity of the moment as an exhorter preacher-woman of activism stood in front and reminded the crowd, many with more gray in their hair than not, that the formation of a Black-led Freedom Party was a cause whose time has come. And being there among the standing-room only coming together of people, who like Fannie Lou Hamer, are “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” was to know that whether it was Montgomery, Alabama before the bus boycott or Selma before the great march, this is what the ground floor of a movement looks like. This is how it begins. Ain’t No Stoppin’ us Now!”
Viola Plummer told the assembly that the Freedom Party is about power and respect in the political process and organizing to achieve it. That was what brought this gathering behind the standard-bearer of the Freedom Party, former Black Panther and current City Councilman Charles Barron.
The petitioning process begins July 6, and this seasoned group is particularly well-suited to that task. The technology of the signature getting has not changed. It remains hand-to-hand-combat. And this first wave of activists bring their old-school patience and people-skills combined with, in some cases, decades of experience in navigating the infamously treacherous New York City petitioning review process. It will be hard work and long hours. In all likelihood, they will get their signatures and they will be good.
Nest will be the education of the masses and with conditions being what they are, the audience will be receptive to the message that a vote for Andrew Cuomo from the Black community is clearly a vote for Massa and there is no freedom in it. It demonstrates nothing except a willingness to be taken for granted. The Democratic Party has already anointed Cuomo governor, so that’s done as far as they’re concerned. The needs of the African-American community are simply of no interest to them. They are strange but not unusual in that way. Even June 29th’s New York Times Echoed Charles Barron’s complaint with the Democratic Party ticket, reporting on the amazing whiteness of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s administration. “The city’s non-Hispanic white population is now 35%.But Mr. Bloomberg presides over an administration in which more than 70% of the senior jobs are held by whites.” This explains why we see Dennis Walcott, Deputy Mayor for Operations, at so many events representing the mayor. He’s the designated guy.
This political system makes decisions based on a white supremacist legacy, a sort of “Post-Traumatic White Supremacist Syndrome” where the centuries of indoctrination in the belief of white superiority, is difficult to shake.
An example of the difference this thinking makes in real-world actions was the Division of Economic and Financial Opportunity created by Mayor David Dinkins, which was bringing fairness to New York City contracting and was on the way to creating businesses and jobs in the African-American community but the Giuliani administration killed it. Now Governor David Paterson is having agencies unbundle their contracts to include minority and women suppliers, increasing that purchasing by tens of millions of dollars. To see that those kinds of initiatives are continued in the next administration, African-Americans have to demonstrate they have the power to take away massive numbers of votes and break the back of any candidate that does not get with the program.
This business of being disorganized while everywhere we look, other groups come together and march sharply up to the front of the line, has to come to an end.
The consciousness-raising, the fund-raising and the vote getting will need to harness the mass communication ability of the Web-savvy, PDA-equipped generation. All of the eighteen-year-olds who are ready to vote speak to each other by text and keep up with current events through their mobile devices. With their ability to communicate so quickly they are a sudden army, waiting to be roused. Waiting to plead their own cause as young African-American people.
What is needed is a coming together around the recognition of the unique history of African-Americans and a willingness to demand that history be addressed in policy changes. When the Freedom Party garners several hundred thousand votes, then we’ll see something new start to happen.

FREEDOM PARTY IGNITES MOVEMENT

African-American Issues Brings Together Hundreds at Convention

Freedom Party Hosts First Statewide Convention
Several hundred from around the state packed the historic Siloam Presbyterian Church to ratify Council member Charles Barron as the Freedom Party’s candidate for governor. Barron named Eva Doyle as his running mate for Lieutenant Governor. Mrs. Doyle is a longtime activist, educator, columnist, book author and host of her own radio show called “Eye On History” that airs weekly on station WUFO in Buffalo, NY.
Barron appeared before the enthusiastic crowd wearing a black T-shirt emblazened with “Freedom Party” in bold white lettering and the party’s symbol, chains divided with the word “unchained.”
Freedom Party gubernatorial candidate Charles Barron’s address:
“We have to keep this momentum going. They are hoping we have a one-day event. That we will get all excited and then come tomorrow, it will have been just a good event. What they bet is that we won’t get the signatures. They know we are going to get the votes. They are betting we won’t get the signatures. Everything now is about those signatures. Getting on the ballot. We know that if we come with 40-50,000 signatures, they know we are going to get on that ballot, because there will be 15,000 good ones. And when we get on the ballot, we are going to rock this state. We’ve got to get on the ballot. We are going to be working on a platform. We are going to be working on a strategy. After we get the party, a structure. But right now, it’s money and signatures. That’s the bottom line – money and signatures. That is going to be the challenge for us. We know we can get 15,000 signatures. But what they want us to get is 100 from 15 different congressional districts. Thirteen are downstate. We are going to do that. No doubt.
Let me tell you why we are doing this. This is the perfect time for us to do it. This is the time for us to strike like we have never struck before. There comes a moment in history that you just can’t miss. They have the nerve to go to Rye, NY have their meeting – the State Democratic Party, with all of these Black leaders in the State Democratic Party. (Barron then described this year’s Democratic slate.) This was a political blackout. So since they don’t want you in, let’s step out. Do our thing. Let’s form an independent black-led party. Somebody said to me is this party only for black people? No. It’s going to be black-led, but anybody can join us. We welcome anybody but we are leading this. We said, you don’t want us, fine. Let’s do our own party. This is shaking them up.
The last time we did this, brother Jitu and I, we got Mary France Daniels, Ron Daniels wife on the ballot. She got on the ballot and got 10,000 votes. We got 20,000 signatures from 15 different congressional districts. This time, we are going to get on the ballot and get 50,000 votes and be an independent black-led party. The first one in the history of this state.
We have to do this for Fannie Lou Hamer. In 1963, she was beaten to a pulp trying to get a party, trying to get respect. They beat her badly in jail. Because the same structure in Mississippi – all white slate – is identical to the NYS structure. Identical to Mississippi in 1964. Fannie Lou Hamer fought and she got her Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She said she got sick and tired of being sick and tired. She took over the convention and the whole nation had to listen to Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamer, to your spirit, we are continuing the fight. If she could do it in Mississippi in 1964, we can do it in NY.
We need a Freedom Party. We are sick of the two corporate-run parties. Corporations run this state. Who ever pays you, that’s the one who you dance to their tune. The Freedom Party is going to be free from corporations. It will be the people’s party. We will finance us so that we can be free. There is no two-party system there is one party – Republocrats. It doesn’t matter who gets in.
Mario Cuomo, Andrew’s daddy, built more prisons in NYS than any other governor in the history of this state. This is a man who took your vote for granted. Then put all your children in prison.
We are saying today that the Freedom Party, when we come together, and they try to balance a budget, we are not going to let them spend it on Yankee Stadium and Steinbrenner. We are not going to let them spend the money on the Mets and the Nets arena, and then shut down day care centers and senior citizen centers. Don’t want to build any youth centers. Shutting our schools down. Having the nerve to have the homeless pay rent. How do you take MetroCards from our children and they have to demonstrate just to have you give them back? That kind of nonsense in this state must stop. The Freedom Party is going to put an end to that kind of madness.
The Freedom Party is going to talk about political prisoners. Nobody else will. There are brothers and sisters languishing in the state jails. They did their time. They gave them 25 to life, well they did 25 years. 25 good years in prison. Let them out. Let out freedom fighters out of prison. If it wasn’t for the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army and all of those groups that fought for liberation, we wouldn’t be in this church talking about Freedom Party today.
The Freedom Party is going to fight for our reparations. They paid the Jews. They paid the Japanese. Pay the Africans for your colonization of Africa. Pay the Africans for what you did to us in the Caribbean. Pay the Africans for what you did to us right here in America. America violated us, and reparations is a debt owed for service provided. You can’t work us for free, then tell us that happened a long time ago. We are going to put a commission together in this state, we are going to study the impact of slavery on our communities economically. Pay us our reparations. Then you can keep your welfare. We built this nation. 246 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow and racism and you talk about you don’t owe us nothing. You benefitted off the wealth of our labor. It is time for us to be paid. The Freedom Party will raise these types of issues. It can happen. All things are possible.
It is time for us to stand up like men and women, like John White stood up for his family. Stand up for your family. Get your spine straight. Don’t be afraid. I don’t care about you threatening to take my life. You didn’t give me life and you never can take my life. There is a greater source, a greater power in charge of that. Take my freedom and put me in jail. Bring it. Freedom is a mental thing. I will never be in jail no matter how many bars are in front of me, because my mind will not allow me to be imprisoned. Take my material wealth. I could care less. Keep your little material wealth. I am not interested.
Here we have a $63 billion budget. The City Council passes the budget. We can tell this city that this is how we want the money spent because we are the new majority. Stand up and say the money is going to be spent in the ‘hood for our people because we said so and we have the power to do that. I am sick and tired of giving people power who won’t us it. Adam Clayton Powell said ‘Use what’s in your hand.’ You are going to have power in your hand and give it back to the power structure that is oppressing you. That is insane.
The Freedom Party is going to be talking about Black consciousness on behalf of Steve Biko and the Black consciousness movement. Blackness is definitely not a skin complexion. Pigmentation. It is not whether you have coarse hair or thick lips or African features. Blackness is a state of mind. Blackness is a commitment to Black people. Blackness is a commitment to our children. Blackness is being a man. That is what we need – men and women who are not afraid to be black. It is an agenda. It is about who we are in our community.
When we put the Freedom Party together, anybody who is not serious about our people, don’t mess with us. Because we are not playing.
We are going to rock this state. This state is going to be put on notice that from here on, the 2 million Black people in NYC, and the millions across the state now have a Freedom Party that is going to free us from all of those things that we were fearful of. Now it is coming to fruition. Freedom Party!!!”
We have to do this for Shirley Chisholm. Rosa Parks. Assata Shakur. We have to do this for all those who spilled blood before we got here. Let’s do this. Freedom Party!!!
By unanimous acclimation, Charles Barron was declared the Freedom Party’s candidate for governor.
The temporary headquarters of the Freedom Party is located at Sistas’Place on the corner of Nostrand and Jefferson Avenues. More pictures on page 12.

The Forgotten Black Fishermen in the Gulf Oil Spill

The news coverage of the Gulf oil spill might lead you to think black fishers did not exist or were not affected.  That is not true, although they are a dwindling breed.

Correspondent Brentin Mock and photographer Shawn Escoffery ferreted them out and listened to their stories.

Black Gulf Fishers Face a Murky Future

By: Brentin Mock

The African-Americans who make their living from shrimp and oysters on the Louisiana Gulf Coast have long been an endangered breed. The oil spill may be the final blow to their way of life.
“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oysterknife.” – Zora Neal Hurston
As Rodvid Wilson boards close the sides of his uncle’s boat he hums Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat” while preparing for a voyage through the Louisiana bayou into the bays above the Gulf of Mexico.  In the cabin behind the wheel sits Judge Williams, 67, an oystermanfor over 40 years. Behind him is a bunkbed, where he and his nephew Wilson often sleep. By the bed is a small gas stove. The smell of neckbones and hot metal mix as a pot of beans burns on one eye, and a small hatchet burns on the other.  Sitting next to the stove is half an oyster shell with cigarette ashes in it. A half-empty pack of Newports rests close by.

Riding with his good friend Ameal Wilson, Williams steers out into an open-water area near the Fucich Bayou wetlands, which sprout  around Louisiana’s southeastern coast. Just beyond this area are the Black Bay and American Bay, where oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill have begun to encroach, threatening fish, birds and protective marshland. If the crude oil gets too deep, it’ll kill off the seafood from which Williams and his crew make a living.
Back in Pointe a la Hache, a town on the east bank of the Mississippi River, is where Williams docks his boat, as do dozens of other African-American oyster harvesters, shrimp trawlers and fishers. It is, in fact, the area from which much of Louisiana and the rest of the United States get their oysters and shrimp; where Antoine Dominique “Fats” Domino hung out, and his lead guitar player Jimmy Moliere was born and raised; and, it’s where black self-sufficiency has been more reality than slogan.
African Americans in lower Plaquemines Parish, where Pointe a la Hache and other black towns such as Davant and Phoenix are found, have raised their families and communities on this seafood for generations. Fishing in this area,  about 50 miles south of New Orleans, has also been a steady source of income and employment for them since the early 20th century.
At peak, hundreds of black fishers occupied this area, but their numbers have dwindled. Hurricane Katrina, which entered Louisiana through this region in 2005, retired many fishers early by destroying their boats and homes. Now, the question asked with dread is: Will the BP oil spill finish off what Katrina started: the vanishing of a proud, historic black fisher community?

As oil invades deeper, it could be that soon the oyster shells won’t even be good enough to catch cigarette ashes in.
Standing in front of a trailer with BP posters taped on the door is Byron Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, who has called a meeting one Saturday afternoon to discuss their futures. One by one, black men and women of all ages step into the assembly area, their chief concern being how they’ll be compensated for their losses. The levees maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect them from hurricanes and floodshave been literally failing them left and right.
“We should take the Army’s name off the Corps of Engineers,” says Encalade, a vet. “They should be called the Political Corps of Engineers. They have been working for the politicians and the oil companies. They are not working for the people.”
Under BP’s claims process, for those losing revenue due to the spill, each fisher is entitled to $5,000 per month — just a fraction of the $10,000 to $40,000 many collect monthly from their catches.  As for BP’s “Vessels of Opportunity” program, where fishers can get trained to take their boats and crews out to deploy boom and skim oil, only a few of them have been called for work.  The black fisher community is so small and tight-knit – by their own estimates, only about 50 to 75 — that they all know each other, and can name the handful presently working for BP.  
The west bank of the Mississippi River holdsall the action. That is where the Venice, La. command center is, where BP, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, EPA and other government agencies huddle to produce oil containment plans, which have been mostly failures. Venice is at the tip of the Louisiana coastal peninsula, and every day dozens if not hundreds of news reporters dart down the highway looking to find oil leaking onto shores and marsh, and for officials leaking information for their stories.
But the oil threat first headed east of the river, where it continues to infiltrate, long before winds took some of the oil west.  The state’s Fisheries and Wildlife department first closed down the fishing areas on May 1. They were opened again on May 15, for limited trawling and fishing, but the people here know that the fishing areas might not be open much longer. They’ve already had more than their fair share of struggles.
“Through the years, due to unfair policies from both the state and federal governments, we’ve lost about 90% of our oyster farms, and probably the same amount of boats,” says Encalade. “There are probably just a few black families left with oyster boats that support the rest of what’s left of the small black fisherman community here.”
The oyster farms, or oyster beds, are sea-bottom areas that can be privately leased for harvesting oyster seeds picked up from government-owned sea areas in the winter and spring. African Americans began owning their own boats in the 1960s and 70s, and soon after began owning oyster beds. However, says Encalade, these black owners were limited by government as to where they could fish and harvest.
In the late 70s, a group called The Fishermen and Concerned Citizens of Plaquemines Parish, led in part by Rev. Tyrone Edwards, helped reverse laws that prevented the use of hand dredging, or what’s called “coonin’,” used by small-time oystermen, usually black. The ban would have favored the larger industrial companies whose vessels could scoop up oysters in bulk.  
And then there was  Katrina, which made its debut in Louisiana by cresting the eastern levees surrounding these communities, demolishing virtually every home in this area. Fishers whose houses were boats lost their homes and businesses simultaneously.  Edwin “Peewee” Riley, an 84-year-old ex-fisher – one of the oldest standing — lost his $150,000 boat in the hurricane, while Encalade lost three boats.
Those still in the fishing game have few other options. Many of them have been fishing since they were teens — “Peewee” Riley since he was 14. It’s all they know how to do. Few have diplomas beyond high school and some cannot read.
Judge Williams snakes his vessel through the bayou without the use of GPS, navigation devices or even a map. Back in Magnolia, Mississippi, where he’s from, he graduated from the 8th grade to the fishing boat and hasn’t looked back. The entire water-scape is in his head, and he doesn’t “fool with no maps.”
His nephew Rodvid Wilson, an ex-convict, was sent down South by his mother from New York to learn hard work and discipline from his uncle. Wilson admits his family job corps trip is paying off, not only in money but in character. He was cited last August, though, for illegal oyster dredging in unleased water bottoms – fishers still can only collect oysters where the government tells them to. He was cited that day along with five others whose last names suggest South American descendancy.
If the oil spill shuts them down, both groups are faced with entering a society where the face of unemployment, poverty and incarceration is too often theirs. What else can they do but cast down their buckets where they are?
After a long day in the bay, Wilson lays down his hatchet, used earlier for breaking down clusters of oysters. Pulling off his rubber gloves, which have minces of oyster guts all over them — as does his face —  he goes in the cabin for a plate of blackeyed peas and rice. After eating only a portion, he stops, complaining that he hasn’t been able to eat or sleep in days. From the pack of Newports he pulls a cigarette, lights it, and takes a couple drags before ashing on the deck, not far from piles of oysters.
“You barely see our people out here anymore,” he says. “This is a dying breed.”
Brentin Mock is a reporter for the New Orleans investigative reporting news Web site The Lens.

STORY OF SAM COOK REACHES FAR BEYOND MUSIC BOUNDARIES

During the early 1960′s, he ..
. encouraged Black people to support Black Press.
. read voraciously from early childhood and believed that reading enlarged the world.
. was a great student of  Black History, inspired by John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom.
And the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes.
. was the first African-American artist to achieve crossover success, reaching #1 on the pop charts. 
. refused to appear before racially-segregated audiences in The South.
. was a self-determined entrepreneur in the record industry.
. wore a natural at the height of his success before Black “became” Beautiful in 1964, the year he died at age 33.
And there’s more to Sam Cooke’s story, so much more we would have learned had he lived to reach his 79th birthday this January.
“Sam Cooke: Crossing Over” will be presented on THIRTEEN’s American Masters series, Monday, January 11 at 9:00pm on PBS.  Narrated by Danny Glover, the film features archival footage and interviews with Cooke’s family and intimates including Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, Bobby Womack, Jimmy Carter, Billy Preston, Sam Moore, Dick Clark, Jerry Wexler and more. 
The documentary follows the composer-lyricist-performer’s music career and shows how “game-changer” Cooke “created a new American sound.” With his “You Send Me” selling over a million records in 1957, the young gospel star alienated some fans by embracing “the devil’s music,” but he forever altered the course of popular music in America, and he still impacts today, 45 years after his death.
His “Change is Gonna Come” of 1962 was featured in Spike Lee’s 1992 biographical film Malcolm X and the same song inspired President Obama’s 2008 historic speech on race. 
Cooke’s career was meteoric at every stage.  From early childhood, his silky, soaring voice electrified the congregation at his father’s First Baptist Church in Chicago.  By age 19, he became the lead vocalist for The Soul Stirrers gospel group.  He redefined the genre and became gospel’s first iconic, and ironically, sexy superstar.  Women flocked to his concerts to experience Sam, not Jesus.
Cooke had twenty-nine top-40 hits in the U.S. between 1957 and 1964. Major hits like “You Send Me”, “Cupid,” “A Change Is Gonna Come”, “Chain Gang”, “Wonderful World”, “Another Saturday Night”  and “Bring It on Home to Me” are some of his most popular songs. Cooke was also among the first modern Black performers and composers to attend to the business side of his musical career. He founded both a record label and a publishing company – accomplishing what no other Black performer had ever attempted -as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer. He also took an active part in the American Civil Rights Movement. His poignant, biting lyrics, especially on “Change” and “Chain Gang” were fashioned out of the depth of personal pain.
The film also shows his courageous stand against racism, and how he opened doors for Other artists, including mentoring Aretha Franklin and launching Otis Redding.
A great companion piece to the documentary is Peter Guralnick’s masterful biography Dream Boogie that captures the music scene of the late 1950s and ’60s and the “evocation of harsh realities” faced by Black musicians at that time.
In a phone interview with Our Time Press in November 2005, Guralnick said, “If the world had been a different place in the ’60s, Cooke would have been at a stature higher than any other performing artist in the world.   He was a lot smarter, more attractive, more talented, and definitely a genius and visionary. Today he would have been doing great things.  He might have been the Mayor of Chicago.”
Certainly, he would have been speaking out, as he did back then through his music and through his work.  He was not afraid to speak about Black love and Black women. At the end of his life at 33, he was already beginning to work to empower the lives of other musicians, writing songs for them, encouraging them to go into their own businesses.
But you also know his pain: following Sammy Davis around, according to Guralnick, to get him to rehearse with him to no avail; and joy – hanging out at the home of the Rev. C.L. Franklin, the father of Aretha;  meeting Muhammad Ali, then-Cassius Clay.  The late-night road shows with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Garnet Mimms; radio interviews with the Magnificent “Burn, Baby, Burn” Montague disc jockey and so on.
To put together his portrait, Guralnick went to the people who knew him best, his brother, Bobby Womack, the Simms Twins, Magnificent Montague, his friend and business partner JW Alexander, Barbara Campbell.
But there is an abrupt end to Cooke’s life story in Guralnick’s book and the AMERICAN MASTERS documentary: Cooke was gunned down and killed by the manager of a California motel under questionable circumstances.  She claimed self-defense.
Four-time Grammy-winner Etta James’ autobiography Rage to Survive reveals and shares another view.  James says she viewed Cooke’s body in the funeral home.  She said he was so badly beaten that his head was nearly separated from his shoulders, his hands were broken and crushed, and his nose was mangled.
Etta James, writes Myra Panache on her Panache Reports Web site, talks about the special friendship she shared with Cooke in her autobiography Rage to Survive.
 ”Me and Sam were walking from the parking lot into a club in California; we had to pass this little alley. Sam stopped and said, ‘Wait here, I’ll be right back.’ He strolled back to the alley and started shaking hands with all the bums. They loved him. He knew a lot of their names and they knew all of his songs. When one offered Sam a sip of wine, he didn’t hesitate. Sam reached right down, took the bottle in his hand and turned it up to his mouth and took a big swig. He gave you the impression that he was blessed to be Sam Cooke but he was always for the underdog in ways that weren’t showy.”
“Sam was also smart; he understood that ownership was the name of the game. He wanted to control his own record company and publishing and he wanted to cut the wiseguys out. I was devastated when he was murdered. One theory is that someone slipped him a mickey.
“No woman could have inflicted the injuries he suffered; I figured that (someone slipped him a mickey and it) had worn off at some point. That’s when Sam started struggling with the guys who were trying to kill him. They beat him and shot him and concocted this far-out story that no reasonable person could believe. At his inquest, they argued that Sam was drunk but when they tried to determine what was in Sam’s body, the court refused to hear the evidence, calling it irrelevant. The mickey would have led to more questions, questions that couldn’t be answered.”
A casual conversation here in Brooklyn back in 2005 revealed that Ms. James’ version is likely more factual than not.  The Rev. of Crossover Baptist Church on Marcus Garvey here in Bedford-Stuyvesant lived in the same South Central neighborhood as the Figueroa Street motel where Cooke was shot dead.  “Rumors were widespread that the greatest performer of that time was the victim of a hit.”
Maybe that story will be the subject of another book or documentary on the man who would be King of Pop music and the pop business world.   For now, read Etta James’ autobiography Rage to Surivive and Guralnick’s book, Dream Boogie.  But also watch AMERICAN MASTERS’ Sam Cooke: Crossing Over, executive produced by PBS’ Susan Lacy, on January 11.   -      
                 Bernice Elizabeth Green