BROOKLYN RETIREES FIND SUCCESS IN EMBRACING LIFELONG PASSION: UPSTATE HERB FARMING

View From Here: Dastardly Deeds

“There are two things you need for success in politics. Money, and I can’t think of the other,” was Senator Mark Hannah’s (R-OH) analysis in 1903 and it pretty much held true until Bloomberg spent $100 million  dollars and barely eked out a victory over William Thompson. 

Mayor David Dinkins had called it exactly right at a Manhattan fundraiser five days before the election when he spoke about the polls as “nonsense” and insisted that Thompson can win.  “Bill Thompson is in a win-win position,” said the former mayor of New York.  “First of all, the very worst that can happen is that he would lose by a certain margin.  Were that to occur, it will be a far smaller margin than is anticipated by the pollsters and by Mayor Bloomberg.  That alone is a victory.”

And yet the story could have had such a different ending if more people had kept the faith, but that was not to be, most embarrassingly in the Black church.   The late Reverend William Augustus Jones of Bethany Baptist Church used to say, “You eat the king’s meat, you do the king’s bidding.” And that continues to hold true as shown by the wide support Mayor Bloomberg was given by the so-called leaders of the religious establishment and those who want to join them.  During slavery, the church was a place away from the master, where destinies could be determined outside of his control.  Begun as a pacifier, it became a conduit for strength and freedom.  During Reconstruction, the church was a place of safety and personal development.   The church was a place where a Civil Rights Movement could come to life and change the nation. 

Today, too many churches have become conduits for the master’s dollars and have returned to the role of  pacifier of the masses.  There is no more interest in advancing African-Americans, only in building a Development Corporation into a local empire and buying a really good-looking suit.  

And these ministers have no shame in their game.  After all, they are only doing what is pragmatic.  “You do have to get cooperation from city agencies in order to get things done,” said Rev. A.R. Bernard, Sr. the pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn.  “Everything I have ever called on, his people called right back, and been supportive,” said Rev. Floyd H. Flake, the pastor of the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in Queens.

Had these pastors been centered on continuing their role of guiding their congregations on the road to liberation, they would have used their offices as a base for Bill Thompson, eschewing the “king’s meat” and growing their own by standing together and demonstrating to young people that you can walk your own way.   Had they acted in the faith that took us through the hard times rather than in fear and self-interest, they’d have gotten either their planned project anyway or a different one when Thompson became mayor.  They could also have been instrumental in African-Americans regaining control of the education of their children.  They could have ushered in a return to the Dinkins-era of minority contracting programs when small businesses thrived on city contracts.   They would have helped their congregations to earn the living that would allow them to care for their elders in their own multigenerational households in homes they owned rather than giving them over to a senior program supplied with master’s money.  They would have shown that their air of dignity and respect was deserved, and not just the theatrical posturing of  well-dressed minstrels sent out to perform every Sunday to the willingly blind.  We miss you Reverend Jones.

When term limits were enacted, there was a rush of candidates in the 36th Council District and we got a taste of what 2012 will look like, with candidates popping up wanting to run because it seems like a good idea.  We hope those who are thinking of running will spend these intervening years not merely showing up at meetings, but doing actual work, giving real time to community issues and programs and showing the vision and leadership that will set them apart at the next election.

The Brooklyn That Can’t be Bought…

 

Mike Bloomberg’s first thoughts the morning after Mayoral election night might have wavered seamlessly between “ I won!” and “I almost lost!”  A bittersweet victory/defeat for the richest man in New York City, who lives in a world where powerful egos have no patience with almost losing.  He won 557,059 expensive votes to Democrat Bill Thompson’s low-cost 506,717.

 

That morning, our friend Robert Taylor woke up to a world that eludes the city agencies.  He was at peace padding his way from Brevoort Place to Clinton Hill’s Grand Avenue, as he does every morning.  “If it snows, I pick up a shovel and clean the streets for a few dollars. I just keep moving, but I keep coming back.”  Virtually homeless after losing his apartment on the avenue just after 9/11 due to escalated rents; Robert is accustomed to “street guy” references.  But he also knows how to train horses; he does not bet on them.  He sometimes entertains small crowds, outdoors, with his phenomenal classic music playing, when a used piano is dropped off at his friend Eddie Hibbert’s Antique warehouse down the street.

Mr. Taylor informed us that the Mayor shelled out about $200.00 per vote  for each of the more than half million votes he received, compared to his Democrat opponent Bill Thompson’s $14 each for almost the same amount of votes.  “But, remember, it’s not always about the money; it’s about what you want that money to do. When the stakes are high, you cast high bets to win at any cost.  He now has a lot of work to do to make true on those promises he paid for.”

On the north easternmost edge of Brooklyn, Mr. B., a block association president and former corrections officer agrees, but he still thinks arrogance, not money interfered with Mr. Thompson’s sure shot.  At his election site, the lever for DeBlasio was stuck, and the pollworker told him gruffly,  “Don’t worry ‘bout that, it’ll count.”  After putting his strength on that lever to bring it to its place, he informed everyone present what was going on.  “This ‘kiss-my-ass’ attitude – on the part of a lot of folks connected with the political process, including local elected officials, only succeeds in keeping voters away.  And it may have pushed votes away from Thompson.  People are turned off, they don’t want to participate. 

“At the community board meeting this week, a guy stands up and asks about construction jobs that are going to other ethnic groups who don’t live in the neighborhood; a weatherization official announces that it doesn’t make sense for owners of 2-family homes to apply for special funding, ‘especially,’ he said, ‘since you don’t use that much hot water anyway’, plus we learn about 75% of the program’s $10 million is available to owners of multi-family dwellings, well – that’s not us; then there’s these rezoning issues and whether or not certain areas of Bedford –Stuyvesant will be rezoned in accordance with the special interests of other ethnic groups in other areas.  Point is … if local politicians are servants of the public, they should come out of their comfort zones and get into the neighborhood and go to the people. Explain to them what’s going on.”

The 45-year-old block association president was recently stopped by police in Herbert Von King Park and asked to show ID because he was walking through the park at night, three nights before the election.  Officers apologized profusely after they discovered he was a retired Corrections Officer. “This is the way it is.  But attitudes across the board must change if they are to get the support from all of the people.

“Some of the young Turks seeking election against incumbents could have gotten a lot of mileage out of putting their weight solidly and visibly behind Mr. Thompson. There are so many lessons to be learned.”

It’s still no excuse for such a low turnout, says New York City Parks worker Earl Williams.  “When I went to P.S. 305 at 4pm to vote, there was no one there except the poll workers.”

It was chilly and dry the day after the election, and everyone had something to say abouthow Thompson should have won. Except, of course, the mainstream press, stunned that their polls didn’t get it right, and perhaps numbed by the same thinking as Taylor, Mr. B., Mr. Williams and Mr. Bloomberg: if Black people had turned out, in force, Thompson, who earned 50.9% of Brooklyn votes to Mr. Bloomberg’s 45.3%, would have enjoyed the landslide of the century.  For pennies on the dollar.  Lessons to be learned, indeed.

New Democratic Political Club Seeks to Bring Power to the People

“We are very grass roots,”  said Renee Collymore, standing outside the new Parliament Democratic Club, housed in a narrow storefront on Putnam Avenue, between Grand Avenue and Downing Street.  Ms. Collymore is just coming off her work as Deputy Campaign Manager for Queens Democratic Council Member David Weprin during his run for city comptroller and is still geared for action.  “Democracy has to be exercised and it is not being exercised to its fullest here in Brooklyn.  The people have to be energized.  Political freedom is very important and the people have been giving up their power to the elected officials because of lazy voting and inertia.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While there are other political clubs in the area, Ms. Collymore says that the way for a political club to have an impact on the community is to actually perform useful services, and that is where her club will differ.  “It cannot be just politics while people are not getting assistance.  Politics mixed with social programs is the key,” says Ms. Collymore.  “Politics alone makes  a club handicapped.   We have implemented a pilot program, The Fundamentals of Citizenship, to sixth-graders where I will be teaching them their responsibility as citizens, and what their duties are as citizens.  Even as sixth-graders, they are citizens. 

“This is a Democratic Club with an independent voice.  We have Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians in this club. This is a club of inclusion.  I want to popularize the idea of political clubs again.  I want to pull people out of poverty and give them political clout.  I want the little political club on the corner to be like a small branch of government.  We will be working block-by-block to include people so that they can exercise their power locally.” 

View From Here: Why William Thompson for Mayor

Bill Thompson grew up on Putnam Avenue between Stuyvesant and Malcolm X Blvd.   The journey from those streets to being elected City Comptroller in 2001, managing a staff of more than 700 with a budget of $68 million and being overwhelmingly reelected in 2005,  is a long one with middle-class struggles, and successes achieved by hard work.  It is a journey that has attuned Comptroller Thompson to the problems that the middle class and middle class aspirants feel every day.  It has also given him the confidence to use the strategy necessary for this mayoral battle.  “The only way to compete with the richest man in New York City is to build from the ground up.  If you’re going to get into a dollar battle, you’re going to lose very quickly.” 

Thompson was speaking at a fund-raiser in the UN Plaza home of Edward Bergman and his family, high above the East River and about as far from Putnam Avenue as you can get. Here, Bill Thompson was speaking about education  and the need to go in a different direction.  “Our young people are being taught to take standardized tests,” he said.  “Our children are not taught critical thinking.  They’re not taught comprehension.  Not taught the skills they will need in the future.  We’re being given a false sense of accomplishment and all it is leading to is that our children are not being taught to compete.” 

Bill Thompson has an empathy with ordinary people that Mayor Bloomberg feels can be achieved by riding the subway four or five times a week.  But the Brooklyn Papers reported that in their interview with the Mayor, they asked about community benefit agreements, such as that signed by Bruce Ratner for the Atlantic Yards Project.  “I’m violently opposed to community benefits agreements,” the mayor replied.   “A small group of people, to feather their own nests, extort money from the developer? That’s just not good government.”    This statement alone disqualifies him as a choice for Mayor of New York City.  Here he is the richest man in New York, oblivious to the irony of his being “violently opposed” to small groups of unemployed Black men, many living pressed in by the explosion of construction in downtown Brooklyn, feathering their public housing nests, by demanding the opportunity to do hard work. 

He accuses them of extortion for insisting that developers of the gilded city rising only blocks away, put aside a portion of contracts and work for local people and companies.  He has $16 billion dollars, but helping someone bring home a paycheck for rent, food and clothing is “not good government.”  His concept of good government would have met with a vigorous nod of approval from Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who, the apocryphal story goes, when told the starving masses had no bread, thought she’d be cute and said, “Let them eat cake.”  True or not, it was 1793 during the French Revolution and the people objected to the haughty attitude and the lady lost her head.  

The mayor’s team seems to have lost their collective heads as well or they must have read something in the polls saying it won’t be a double-digit win, to risk bringing in Rudy Giuliani, the biggest loser in the Republican presidential primaries, and someone anathema to the African-American community, to campaign with the mayor. Giuliani knows as much now as when he snickered at the Republican Convention at the thought of a “community organizer” becoming president.

Rudy’s connecting an election of William Thompson with a probable rise in crime and Bloomberg, frankly dishearteningly, going further, saying that New York can go the way of Detroit if Thompson were elected, was certainly the most offensive local politicking we’ve seen in some time.  Why does a billionaire have to resort to running a morally bankrupt campaign? Maybe it is as former mayor David Dinkins said at the Manhattan fundraiser, they have forgotten the great Negro Baseball League player Satchel Paige’s admonition, “Don’t look back, they may be gaining on you.” 

I don’t know what the calculus is here, perhaps the old tactic of tricking poor whites that they and the plantation owners share a bond, but it is certainly dismissive of the Black vote and those who would rather have the men of the neighborhood going to and from work rather than standing around chronically unemployed.   The mayor’s office has to become centered on the problems of regular working people and those who want to be working, and the city budget has to be used to not only deliver services but to circulate in the communities that need them most, lifting the quality of life for all New Yorkers.  It’s time for the Bloomberg era to come to a close.   Polls open 6am, November 3rd.  Every vote counts.

THE BEST MAN

Bill Thompson was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of hard-working parents, an educator and a judge.

 

He’s lived almost all of his life in Central Brooklyn.

He grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant on Putnam Avenue between Stuyvesant and Marcus Garvey Blvd. (then Reid Avenue) in the house his grandparents William and Louise Thompson succeeded in purchasing 70 years ago.  They were the second Black family on the block.  They later took pride in their grandson being an acolyte at St. Phillips Episcopal Church on Decatur Street.

Mr. Thompson’s mother, Elaine Thompson, who taught at various public schools, including P.S. 262, was a member of a team of compassionate educators — Almira Coursey, Elaine DeGrasse Perkins, Virginia Pope, June Fleary and others — who privately pushed young strivers to reach their potential.  And they never took public credit for it.

Over the years, Mr. Thompson has lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Heights and other areas, before finally returning to his boyhood home where he resided until last year; he now lives in Harlem.

And while the years have been good to him, he has not forgotten where he came from or where most hard working New Yorkers are coming from.

“My parents taught me to work as hard as you can, do the best job you can, and know that no one is going to give you anything; you have to go out and earn it.”

And Mr. Thompson has earned it.

In fact, the best man for the job of Mayor of New York City — it’s being decided by admirers from the tony penthouse apartments on the Upper East Side to the brownstones of the Comptroller’s old neighborhood — is Mr. Thompson.  Plus, they say, he is asking for your vote based on his ability to lead and to talk eye to eye.  He’s not paying for it. 

In 2001, Mr. Bloomberg spent $74 million to run in the mayoral race. He said then that his spending was “obscene” and that he would not spend that much on a campaign ever again.

In 2005, he spent $85 million for his re-election bid in 2005.

This year, his spending is estimated upwards from 100 million dollars, pointing out not so much how powerful he is as much as how fearful he may be of Thompson’s power.

In some respects Mr. Bloomberg’s wealth is not the central issue; after all, it is his money.  “No matter how much money is spent, our votes can’t be bought, that’s the message,” Thompson has said, and adds in a reference to Mr. Bloomberg’s successful push in reversing term-limits rulings. “Eight is enough.”

This Tuesday, November 3^rd Central Brooklyn will have an opportunity to vote for new leadership. If this does not happen, apathy will win the election, not Mr. Bloomberg.

- Bernice Elizabeth Green

Medgar Evers College Commemorates Domestic Violence Month

Domestic violence came close to home this year at Medgar Evers College. Two days after the beginning of the semester, a tragic case of domestic abuse occurred on the streets near the college.

On a bright, sunny afternoon student Kaidan Ramsey, 22, was confronted by her enraged husband, Lenox Ramsey, 25, as she was entering the campus. Lenox Ramsey dragged Kaidan down the street. According to witnesses, when she broke free, desperately screaming for help, Ramsey chased Kaidan, grabbed her arm and screamed, “I got a gun, don’t —- with me!” After Ramsey fired two warning shots into the air to scatter the crowd, Lenox shot Kaidan twice in the back. Kaidan was taken to Kings County Hospital in stable condition. She survived the attack. Police arrested Lenox shortly after the incident. Lenox Ramsey told detectives he thought his wife was having an affair with a fellow Medgar Evers student.

Kaidan had moved out of the couple’s home three days earlier. Lenox, a security guard, was known to frequently fight with his wife and fellow residents in the couple’s apartment building in Brownsville, according to neighbors.

The horrific incident was recorded on a nearby surveillance camera.

On Monday, October 19th at 1:30 pm, the Male Development and Empowerment Center (MDEC) will host a special domestic violence forum in the Founders Auditorium. The gathering, entitled “Domestic Violence: Moving Men from Allies to Activists,” is designed for male students as part of an ongoing effort to address the issue of domestic violence from a male perspective.

“We are trying to raise awareness amongst men,” said Larry Martin, director of the Male Development and Empowerment Center, “and attempting to educate and re-educate our men about their personal responsibility in ending men’s violence against women.”

Special guest speakers are community voices who work with men on a wide variety of issues. Quentin Walcott is program director of CONNECT Training Institute (CTI) – an organization whose mission is to expand the number of professionals and community members who have a deep understanding of the dynamics and consequences of violence in the family. By providing intensive training, CTI participants with tools necessary to develop community-based solutions for the complex problem of family violence. Lumumba Bandele is a SEEK program instructor and domestic violence activist. Kevin Powell is a community activist, author and Male Development spokesman who has spoken and written extensively on the issue of domestic violence.

Through this event, MDEC hopes to prompt a discussion that assists men in identifying abusive tendencies, educates them on avenues for finding help with this issue, and trains those who are faced with this difficult situation on means of safely intervening.

“We are targeting men and what they can do,” said a spokesperson for Medgar Evers President William L. Pollard. This year’s gathering, in recognition of Domestic Violence Month, is part of President Pollard’s overall mission to make Medgar Evers College a “student-centered campus.”
The event is open to the community.