Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

By Freddie Hamilton
“Bridge  Street students today, America’s leaders tomorrow”, says  Rev. David B. Cousin, Sr., Pastor of Bridge Street AWME Church. This gives a  glimpse into the reason why he has had such a profound commitment to the support  of the Bridge  Street Preparatory School since his arrival in  1997 as Pastor of the church. The Prep school, located in the heart of Bedford  Stuyvesant, is a grade school that serves kindergarten through 6th  grade. The school has a strong Christian, Africentric, child centered program  that promotes high self-esteem, the motivation to excel and a thorough  understanding of the African American role in history throughout the world. 
“Africentric is purposely spelled with an i, not an o because Africa is our center” says Principal Rev. Deborah  Finley-Jackson. Bridge Street  Prep School follows New  York State Standards and is equipped with computers and other technological  equipment. Enrichment activities in music, dance, art and drama are  provided.
Since its inception the school has remained small with an  average class size of ten students in order to provide each child with  individual attention and to give each of them an opportunity to develop critical  and analytical thinking skills. Teachers use hands on activities and  manipulative teaching aids to help students make connections between concrete  and abstract concepts. Rev. Finley- Jackson is a career educator well known for  her innovative approaches to teaching that motivates children to strive to reach  their full potential. Mrs. Finley- Jackson’s strong background in education  together with her strong religious values has helped her to create a unique  learning environment that addresses the needs of the whole child. Rev.  Finley-Jackson says “Our students leave our school with a strong personal  relationship with Jesus Christ, as well as an excellent understanding of the  strong presence of African Americans in the development of this country”  
Bridge Street  AWME Church has always demonstrated a  commitment to the education of African American children. In the early 1800’s  African Americans began to understand that education was necessary for their  children in order to compete in American society. When the free school movement  began in the village of Brooklyn in 1827, the trustees of Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Church opened the first free school for  “colored” children. The school was later administered by the Brooklyn Common  Council and in 1841 became known as the African Public School No. 1. Today that  school is known as P.S. 67, located in the Fort-Greene section of Brooklyn.  In 1982, then Pastor Rev. Dr. Fred A. Lucas, Jr .and his  assistant Pastor Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Lucas, rekindled the vision for Bridge  Street Church to provide quality education for African American children in  central Brooklyn.     
On Friday January 28,  2005 the Board of Trustees of the Prep school will sponsor its annual  gospel show fund raiser at the church. The Prep school students will be  featured. All are invited to join us. For further information contact the school  at 718-455-2777. 
The website is _www.bridgestreetprep.org_ (http://www.bridgestreetprep.org/)

By Aminisha Black
Parenting is a Balancing Act
Effective parenting in this culture is a matter of fulfilling physiological needs, nurturing emotional and social stability and advocacy.  Acknowledging the necessity to handle and balance all of these can provide a map of sorts for this job, which can and often does become stressful.  Taking responsibility for meeting the needs of our children forces us to seek ways of recreating the village.  When we get clear that skimping in any area is destructive to the child, we will realize the need for Ujima – collective work and responsibility. 
Physiological Needs – The need for food, shelter and clothing must be met in order for the child to move beyond survival and begin to climb the ladder towards achieving his/her potential.  The challenge is distinguishing needs from desires so parents pursuing objects do not abandon their children.  The possibility is collectively meeting these needs – sharing best buys, collective purchases and exchanges to name a few ways.
Nurturing Emotional and Social Stability – There’s a lot of agreement that the major job of parents is to have children find their authentic selves and to socialize them. This segment ranges from self-discovery to education with emphasis on relationship and social responsibility.  Behavioral problems, academic failure and violence can be traced to deficits in this area.  The challenge is to understand the role that our history has played in our development, truthfully assess the negative attitudes we inherited and pass on to our children, refuse victim status and take full responsibility for our child’s development or lack of.  The possibility is collectively creating safe spaces and support networks for parents and children to heal, problem solve and grow without judgements and stigma. 
Advocacy – The acquisition and possession of objects is the highest held value with human needs and development ranking last in this culture.  You have only to watch the stream of commercials aired in 30 minutes of TV to recognize what runs this economy.  To boost this system we are conditioned to devalue our abilities and relinquish our fate to experts.     The challenge is to accept the fact that there is no area of your life or your child’s life that you can turn over to another individual or institution.  This leaves parents responsible for maintaining vigilance from birth throughout.  The possibility is to establish or join advocacy groups where policy and procedures can be simplified and made available to parents who need assistance. 
Our work is laid out for us.  Realizing that people are resources, we heal relationships we can share human resources for the benefit of our children.  We begin by sharing the following information. 
College Bound Students
**Harvard University is offering scholarships for high school honor graduates whose annual family income is less than $40,000.  For information visit http://adm-is.fas.harvard.edu/FAO/index.htm or call the school’s financial aid office at (617) 495- 1581.
**Full scholarships are available to students of color who want to become doctors in order to bring health services to poor communities of the US.  For information call International Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) at 212.926.5757.
**Black Enterprise is offering summer internships for talented and motivated college Juniors, Seniors and Graduate students to participate in its 2005 Summer Internship Program.  Deadline is January 31st. Contact: Ms. Natalie M. Hibbert, Employment &Benefits Manager Black Enterprise Magazine -130 Fifth Avenue -New York, New York 10011.
**High School Seniors should have mailed applications to colleges over the past two months.  The financial aid form FAFSA can be obtained after January 1.  The book,  “8 Steps to Help Black Families Pay for College” – a Princeton Review and Tom Joyner Foundation publication, is an excellent guide for students ninth grade and above.    
Other
**Roots Revisited has scheduled its next college tour during the month of February for students 14 years and under.  Call 718-778-0009 ext. 17.

**New high schools can hold fairs on Feb. 5,6,10,12,13.  Have your 8th grader see the Guidance Counselor if you’re still looking.

Advocacy Opportunity
** NYS Governor has cut $10 million (10,000 jobs statewide) from The Summer Youth Employment Program’s 2005 budget. To join the campaign to retain jobs for NYC youth call Senator Velmanette Montgomery’s office at 718-643-6140.
This year we will practice the Nguzo Saba by bringing collective support to  parents who are facing the same issues in isolation.  Join the Ujima Circle by contacting parentsnotebook-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or writing Parents Notebook, P.O. Box 755, Brooklyn, NY11238 with your contact information.

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How do you keep yourself looking so fabulous? At age 73, Essence Magazine featured you in their annual issue of elderly beauties.
I only eat healthful foods, do Tai Chi, take colonics, and stay away from prescription drugs. Now, I’m into balancing a positive more holistic life. When I had my boutique I kept two personalities: one very upbeat for the store and the other very mellow at home.

Tell me about the boutique
“Studio 14A,”my boutique, which lasted 25 years, was born at my dining table when I was 42 years old. I was sitting and thinking about what I’d been doing all my life. I was not the corporate type although I’d been a forerunner in that, and although I had many interesting jobs I’d never really gotten into a career I enjoyed. Then I asked myself: “What have you been doing all your life that you really like? Fashion was the answer.

How did you begin?
The store was in the basement and later also included the first floor of our brownstone on St. James Place we had bought two years earlier. At that time, 1971, “boutique” was a new word.  I don’t know of any other Black women ever having a boutique in New York before me. Of that era, the only other Black women doing what I was doing were Jackie Lewis, who opened “Grand Hotel” the first women’s boutique in SoHo, Black or white; and Alberta Wright, who had a vintage lace boutique on 72nd Street. Today, Jackie owns a spa and resort in Negril, Jamaica and Alberta has a successful restaurant in Manhattan called “Jezebel.” Both, by the way, were pushed out of their boutiques by rent hikes.

Did you have any experience running a business?
Well, when I started I had no clue. I had worked in Bloomingdales, B. Altman’s and places like that so I knew how to sell.  But I didn’t know where to buy stuff. So, I went to A&S department store, bought what I liked, and added a dollar. No one would tell me how you get merchandise. Many who sold didn’t even know, I later learned.

How did you eventually “crack the code?”
It was incredible hard work. I walked the city of New York looking for merchandise and found the Gift Building. I went in there and they looked at me like I had two heads, the only Black person there. Was I there to sweep the floor or clean the toilets? Then I’d go to showrooms and they’d all look at me. “Where are you from?!” How’d you find out about us??! It was a big learning experience. I also didn’t know how to display merchandise. I didn’t know anything.

Did you study fashion or business in school?
I studied Bloomindales store windows and other places. Then I went to F.I.T. and Parsons School Of Design for courses on how to operate a store and mathematics. Years earlier, I received a B.A. in Art and Design from Queens College. But I learned mostly by doing.

Was Studio 14A successful?
It was. I had a steady and loyal clientele. We were selling African stuff when it was unheard of. When African consciousness came along, I was a forerunner. They came from all around: CT, NJ, and I don’t know where. But they came.

What kinds of marketing strategies did you employ?
People knew me. In December, I’d have big parties and sell merchandise. I’d do Kwanzaa (even before I knew what it was). I’d have a Yoruba priestess, sometimes I’d have a band, but I’d invite everybody and fill the place up. And it worked!

Were you always interested in fashion?
As a teenager, I was crocheting, knitting and designing. It wasn’t unusual. Everybody did that. But when I’d wear all this beautiful stuff I made people would just say plainly, “You sew.” That was the label I got. I didn’t realize I was into fashion. When I graduated from Samuel J. Tilden H.S., I said I’m going to be a dietician because at that time there were no jobs in fashion for anybody – not Black – unless you were just sewing. My mother told me, even at three years of age if she put a red sash and a pink bow on me, I’d say “My bows don’t match!” This is not working (laughing)

How would you encourage Black boutique owners emerging today?
The business is not easy. It’s not just buying and selling and you get money in your hand. My original aim was to get a new kitchen. It took me seven years to buy it, because I had to keep putting all the money back into the business. It takes five years to clear any kind of profit. I think the young people are better at it now from what I am seeing. They have more of a focus.  I just didn’t know. I tried everything at the beginning. One minute I’m doing home furnishings, next minute whatever interested me at the time.  Then one day, Jackie Lewis came by here and said “Every time I come by you have something else.  . . You have no focus.”  Because I always had fashion and I always had jewelry, I became a fashion shop. I was very successful at that. But I also worked incredibly hard. When I wasn’t working it I was thinking it.

Having your business has taught you many life lessons it seems?
When you are younger you are so busy living — you have no time to think about life. You think thinking about your life can wait until you are older, like in your seventies, as I am. But you don’t have to wait until you are in your last lap to begin

by Radley Balko
In Washington, D.C., a 27-year old quadriplegic is sentenced to ten days in jail for marijuana possession, where he dies under suspicious circumstances. In Florida, a wheelchair-bound multiple sclerosis patient now serves a 25-year prison sentence for using an out-of-state doctor to
obtain pain medication. And in Palestine, Texas, prosecutors arrest 72 people – all of them black – and charge them with distributing crack cocaine. The scene bears a remarkable resemblance to a similar mass, mostly-black drug bust in nearby Tulia five years ago.
These examples aren’t exceptional. They’re typical. America’s drug war marches on, impervious to efficacy, justice, or absurdity. Drug prohibition was nowhere to be found in Election 2004. There was no mention of it in the debates, the conventions, or the endless cable news campaign coverage.
In some ways, that was a blessing. Campaign discussion of drug prohibition has too often focused on which candidate took what drugs when, and who was more sorry for having done so.
While it’s refreshing that we’ve moved beyond apologies, it’s also true that under the laws many of today’s politicians support, a kid who experiments with illicit drugs the same way many of them once did may not get the chance to finish school or go to college, much less run for
political office.
The number of policymakers who’ve dared to question any aspect of the drug war could comfortably fit on the back of a pocket-sized edition of the Bill of Rights. This needs to change. America should reexamine its drug policy.
Today, federal and state governments spend between $40 and $60 billion per year to fight the war on drugs, about ten times the amount spent in 1980- and billions more to keep drug felons in jail. The U.S. now has more than 318,000 people behind bars for drug-related offenses, more than the total prison populations of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain combined.
Our prison population has increased by 400 percent since 1980, while the general population has increased just 20 percent. America also now has thehighest incarceration rate in the world – 732 of every 100,000 citizens are behind bars. The drug war has wrought the zero tolerance mindset, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and countless exceptions to criminal defense and civil liberties protections. Some sociologists blame it for much of the plight of America’s inner cities. Others point out that it has corrupted law enforcement, just as alcohol prohibition did in the 1920s.
On peripheral issues like medicinal marijuana and prescription painkillers, the drug war has treated chronically and terminally ill patients as junkies, and the doctors who treat them as common pushers. Drug war accoutrements, such as “no-knock” raids and searches, border patrols, black market turf wars and crossfire, and international interdiction efforts, have claimed untold numbers of innocent lives.  For all that sacrifice, are we at least winning?
Even by the government’s own standards for success, the answer is unquestionably “no.” The illicit drug trade is estimated to be worth $50 billion today ($400 billion worldwide), up from $1 billion 25 years ago. Annual surveys of high school seniors show heroin and marijuana are as available today as they were in 1975. Deaths from drug overdoses have doubled in the last 20 years.
According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the price of of a gram of heroin has dropped by about 38 percent since 1981, while the purity of that gram has increased six-fold. The price of cocaine has dropped by 50 percent, while its purity has increased by 70 percent. Just
recently, the ONDCP waged a public relations campaign against increasingly pure forms of marijuana coming in from Canada.
So despite all of the money we’ve spent and people we’ve imprisoned, despite the damage done to our cities and the integrity of our criminal justice system, despite the restrictions we’ve allowed on our civil liberties, despite the innocent lives lost and the needless suffering we’ve imposed on sick people and their doctors – despite all of this – the drug trade isn’t just thriving, it’s growing. Illicit drugs are cheaper, more abundant, and of purer concentration than ever before.
Like alcohol prohibition before it, drug prohibition has failed, by every conceivable measure. Isn’t it about time for America to take a hard look at its drug policy.
Radley Balko is a policy analyst for the Cato Institute.

Sergeant Pablo Andr‚s Calder¢n was recently killed in Iraq, when a roadside insurgent makeshift bomb exploded near the ruined Sunni City of Fallujah.  Calderon, a lifelong resident of Crown Heights, Brooklyn enlisted into the U.S. Army in 1997, upon graduating from George Westinghouse Vocational High School. He was stationed in Fort Bennings, Georgia, then Korea, followed by Kuwait and last year was dispatched to the front line in Iraq.

According to his sister, Lilliana Calder¢n, “Pablo was a friendly, quiet, good humored, home-based person. He enjoyed music and spent much time disk jockeying under the name of DJ Wolf. He also liked designing; drawing and illustrating customized CD covers. He aspired to become an engineer. In his Thanksgiving e-mail message, he stated, I’m doing all right, had a few close calls, but I’m surviving.. Tell everybody I said hello.. I love the family, .Peace”.
Ms Calderon further stated that “He grew up with his Panamanians immigrant parents in Crown Heights.  His last tour of duty was schedule to be completed in January 2005 and he looked forward to returning home.  My brother is a brave hero; he gave his life for his country.”
Sargeant Calderon’s cousin, Dr. Marco A. Mason, Brooklyn Community activist and CEO of the Caribbean Women’s Health Association, wrote a letter to President George W. Bush, in which he said in part, “The body bags from Iraq are pouring into neighborhoods throughout the country and devastating many families. The United States occupation is breeding insurrection and Jihads. Clearly, this is a no-win war reminiscent of Vietnam. We must stop the bloodshed now. The challenge for peace and to ensure democracy is not an election there in January, but how to create a fair and just political solution between the Shiite, the Kurds and the Sunnis”, Dr. Mason also stated “I am appealing to the public to urge the President to get out of Iraq and to prioritize the War on Terrorism in order to protect Americans.”