Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

On Saturday, November 15, nearly 100 people from the Community Service Society (CSS), The State University of New York (SUNY) and residents of the Dr. Betty Shabazz Complex gathered to cut the ribbon establishing the new ATTAIN (Advanced Technology Training and Information Network) Lab, a state-of-the-art technology  located in the Dr. Betty Shabazz Complex at 700 Gates Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
The opening of the lab is yet another milestone in the restoration and resurgence of this neighborhood. Over the past seven years, residents of the complex and their neighbors from the Medgar Evers Houses have been engaged in a comprehensive community revitalization initiative with the assistance of their nonprofit partners, the Community Service Society of New York (CSS) and Long Life Information and Referral Network (Long Life).
“This lab is a huge benefit to both the residents of Gates and the community. It will enable residents to increase the likelihood of becoming economically self-sufficient, promote economic development in the community by linking residents with businesses, institutions and services, and foster academic skills that students need to succeed later in life,” stated David R. Jones, president of CSS.
The lab serves as a satellite of the State University of New York’s Brooklyn Educational Opportunity Center (BEOC), Dr. Lois Blades-Rosado is the assistant dean and executive director of BEOC. The lab also offers computer training, Internet access, and a range of continuing education opportunities for adults.
Approximately 80 percent of all newly created jobs will require a sound understanding of technology. In late 2001, 75 percent of the nation’s poorest households were still not online. It is reported that only 25 percent of households earning less than $15,000 a year have Internet access. By opening this computer lab, parity is established for residents of this community. A whole new world is a keystroke away.
“The addition of the ATTAIN Lab will provide vitally needed training and support services to the Bedford-Stuyvesant community. I salute the efforts of the Community Service Society in their efforts to improve the quality of life through housing, employment and economic development,” said New York State Assemblywoman Annette Robinson.
The lab will be outfitted with 24 IBM computers that have high-speed Internet access and will incorporate hardware that can be easily upgraded to ensure that this technology center and its contents will not become obsolete within a year or two.

TOYS
What are the winter holidays without toys? Pretty disappointing is the probable answer.  Everyone likes a toy.  Some toys are simple and others are so techie delectable.
Your Toy
For the adults in the home, Sirius (www.sirius.com) offers one hundred streams of satellite radio.  What is satellite radio?  Try digitally produced music and entertainment that’s beamed up to a satellite and then beamed down to subscribers.  What are the one hundred streams?  One hundred channels of crisp, clear sounds packaged for various tastes.  Sirius offers sixty streams of commercial-free music and forty streams of sports, news and entertainment.  There are three satellites orbiting around the Earth that make this happen.  Much of the music is produced live at Sirius’ studios that are located at Rockefeller Center in New York City.  In the world of satellite radio, stream jockeys replace disc jockeys.
What is needed to be in the streams are an antenna, an FM modulator for your car radio or a plug n’ play console.  Subscribing to a service plan and activating one’s account are the final steps.  Imagine: in your car or in your home, crisp clear extreme sports streams or world music or the latest on your favorite celebrity.
VOOM (www.voom.com) is a high definition satellite television service (HDTV).  HDTV turns your home into the local cinema.  Similar to satellite radio, HDTV gives brighter, crisper, and clearer images on the television screen and the HDTV screen is much wider than standard TV-forty-two inches.  The magic behind the picture is the use of smaller dots that make up the images.  Similar to scanning, a clearer image is produced from using smaller dots.  The last touch to the theater effect is the surround sound speaker system: one in the television, two on opposite sides of the television and two behind the couch.
VOOM is also commercial-free and subscription based.  The satellite, Rainbow-1 that was launched July 17, 2003, facilitates the VOOM experience.  A subscription consists of a choice of thirty-nine HD exclusives and ten 24/7 wide screen movie channels.  The satellite TV service requires obtaining a satellite dish, antenna, HD receiver, remote control and the subscription.  Being all in the family, the kids will say, “What’s yours is ours.”  Be charitable and share.
Kid Toy
Xbox is a video game system that’s ‘all the rave’.  If the Website (www.xbox.com) is an example of the actual product, it’s engaging to say the least.  From user reviews Xbox is a powerful games experience.  It supposedly more dynamic than PS2 or Gamecube and has great graphics.  Microsoft, the maker, markets the product to the teen-to-adult segment.  The games categories include Simulation, Sports, Shooter, Racing, Action, Role Playing, Adventure, and Strategy.  The content is rated as Teen, Mature, or Everyone.  The games list appears to be never ending given the number of game producers that work their craft.
The basic equipment is the Xbox console and the controller.  These pieces are attached to a television.  To add depth to the Xbox experience, try Music Mixer for Karaoke and photo displays; the DVD Movie Playback kit; and System Link Cables to connect two Xbox consoles on separate televisions.  Imagine ‘Xboxing’ by yourself, with another person or with a group.  This is accomplished by connecting the Xbox to a television and then, connecting the ‘Xboxed’ television to another one.  It seems that Microsoft seeks to create a world of ‘Xbox people.’
Store Toy
Make way barcode scanners, RFIDs are here.  What are RFIDs?  Radio Frequency Identification is an electronic chip smaller than a grain of sand that emits a radio signal.  RFIDs are currently deployed by the US military.  The US Navy keeps track of wounded personnel and prisoners in military hospitals in Iraq.  US retailers will deploy RFIDs to tag merchandise for inventory and security purposes.  Each chip is unique so any item that is tagged with one can be tracked individually-anytime, anywhere.  Where the barcode identifies a type of good, RFIDs identify the individual item.  Using London Fog raincoats as an example, a barcode can identify a woman’s beige raincoat.  RFIDs can identify the particular beige woman’s raincoat that you bought and can track that coat outside of the store indefinitely.
That close surveillance has people uneasy; therefore, RFIDs will be implemented just short of the end user, in the United States.  RFIDs will tag bulk packages of goods in warehouses.  Wal-Mart requested a large supply and will introduce them by 2005.  Wal-Mart foresee greater control from warehouse to backroom to shop shelves.  Consumers need to organize now to ensure that RFIDs are not attached to pieces of clothing and accessories.
African Briefs
Algeria, Nigeria and South Africa have launched their own satellites.  Nigeria’s NigeriaSat-1 is part of Disaster Monitoring Constellation.  This satellite monitors such environmental concerns as deforestation and water supplies.  At the cost of ten million dollars some quarters criticize the government’s decision, while others see the need to assess the ecological balance.
Africa is more than safari, batik, and soukous.  Africa has a thriving film industry.  Every two years FESTPAC is convened to view and judge the latest full feature and shorts in all genres.  FESTPAC is held at Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso.  The last one was in February 2003.  Plan ahead by booking your flight and hotel accommodations in the latter part of 2004.
Have a computer question, know of a great site?  Contact me at akos_a@juno.com

The teachers took the school’s three fifth-grade classes to the Wall Street Pier for the ceremony marking the return of the African’s remains to New York City in October. The teachers – Deborah Barber, Jeannette MacMillan and Aquilla Raiford – have also invited a representative from the African Burial Ground Office’s speakers bureau to address the class. The teachers followed up the burial ground trip by taking their classes on a tour of the Freedom Schooner Amistad when it docked in New York in November.
After the trip, two of the classes wrote essays about their experience and the third started work on a time-line that told about Africans in colonial New York.
“First I gave them reading materials, and we went over important dates, then every child made their own time-line,” Ms. Barber said. “We started with 1625 when the first African Americans arrived in what was then New Amsterdam and we took that time line until 1863 when they had the big draft riots here in New York City.”
Working in teams, the children illustrated and wrote captions about important events in the African American time-line. Their illustrations and captions displayed on a hall bulletin board include such highlights as:
* “Eleven enslaved men are freed along with their wives, but not their children. They were given farmland North of New Amsterdam. 1644.”
* “The first major highway is built by African Americans. 1685.”
* “A slave market is made on Wall Street and the East River. 1711.”
* “African Free School is established with 40 girls and 40 boys. 1782.”
* “Land for the African Burial Ground granted to the Van Buren Family. 1795.”
“The time line is very important because it gives us a perspective of things and helps us better interpret things that were happening to us that are not in the history book,” Ms. Barber said.
For example, she said, while the text tells of the English taking over New Amsterdam from the Dutch, it does not explain what that meant for African Americans, some of whom had been given freedom and farmland north of Wall Street to settle areas the Dutch considered dangerous Native American territory. The British rescinded those deals.
“When the Dutch surrendered to the British, it was devastating for African Americans; we lost a lot of land and a lot of freedom,” Ms. Barber said.
Still big events, even ones involving African Americans, don’t mean as much to little children as stories about what everyday life was like in colonial New York. Reading aloud excerpts from books and articles that tell these stories piques the students’ interest. It also provides an exercise to strengthen the students’ listening and writing skills – important since there’s an essay question on the state social studies exam.
“I read aloud and have the children take notes, then I have them write an essay about it,” Ms. Barber said.
Materials from the New York African Burial Ground Office of Public Education and Interpretation, slave narratives and a growing number of books about African Americans in colonial days (see list) are resources for the read alouds.
The students also made a map of colonial lower Manhattan to go with their time-line, essays and drawings. A map colonial lower Manhattan in an African Burial Ground Office publication was photocopied onto a transparency, which was projected onto a large sheet of paper on the wall. About five at a time, the students traced the map onto the paper.
Besides interesting bulletin boards, the teachers’ work has produced students who have a better understanding about African Americans in colonial times and their role in making the United States the wealthy nation it has become and who ask questions.
“What was most surprising to me was they way they found the bones, how the bones found at the African Burial Ground were all bent up and crushed together because of the way they were treated and they way they had to work,” said student Chenaisia Campbell.
“I feel the same as Chenaisia,” said Kaily Pinto. “I know they had their spines compressed like that because they carried heavy loads on their backs and on their heads.
“It’s not what so surprising to me, but why haven’t they found more bodies in other states because it’s not like they all came here to bury Africans. There had to be other burial grounds other places,” Kaily asked.
The classes’ tour of the Freedom Schooner Amistad gave the children another opportunity to reach out and touch the history of Africans in colonial New York with their hands as well as imaginations. After the events following the Africans’ revolt, the Amistad was found off the coast of Long Island in 1839. However, it was pulled into New Haven, Conn., because the Africans would have been free automatically in New York, which had abolished slavery in 1827.
Boarding the schooner by planks, handling the ship’s thick sail ropes ,then climbing down into its hull made the story come to life for the children. They sat at the captain’s table for a deck hand’s retelling of the Amistad story that not only included the leadership role of Sengbe Pieh in the celebrated drama, but also told about the children who were on board.
“They talked about a boy – and a girl too – who had gone to the market for his mother and got kidnaped and taken to Cuba,” said student Ernest Walls. “We were inside the cabin of the Amistad. They said the ceiling was only 3 feet tall. It would have been hard for the Africans to move around.”

THE GRIOT: Historian-Writer   Christopher Moore, the author of the Teacher’s Guide for the “Rites of Ancestral Return” project, responds to questions from Baltimore, MD schoolchildren and their teachers on October 1, 2003, just minutes before the start of the city’s ancestral observances. Moore is the chief researcher for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and research coordinator for the African Burial Ground Project. He oversaw the dignified transfer of 4 coffins, containing the remains of 18th century Africans, from a white unmarked truck to hearses in each procession city. He also walked as the procession’s chief sentinel behind the horse-drawn carriages in the cities. Moore co-wrote, with Howard Dodson and Roberta Yancey, The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology, and traces his New York family roots to 1649.

By Herb Boyd
The remains of African ancestors were hardly back in the ground from where they had been unearthed in 1991 before the nearby federal building at 290 Broadway was named to honor Ted Weiss, a New York Congressman who died in 1992.
For more than 12 years community activists had waged a campaign to get the remains of African ancestors re-interred. Now, there was yet another obstacle to peace and tranquility, the naming of a 34-story building hovering over the sacred African Burial Ground.
Dozens of those who had participated in the re-interment, including Councilman Charles Barron (D-East New York) and the Reverend Herb Daughtry, pastor of the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, were once again at the site on November 3, African Solidarity Day, protesting what they viewed as sacrilege.
“We believe it was totally insensitive for them to do this and it’s reminiscent of the disrespect we endured from the General Services Administration over the many years of trying to get our ancestors back where they belong,” said Rev. Daughtry, in a later interview. “This is outrageous, and we don’t mean to cast any aspersions on Mr. Weiss’ name.”
Back in March, 2003, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who represents the 8th District, which used to be Weiss’s Congressional District 17, sponsored a bill to name the building after his predecessor. Weiss was born in Hungary. He was 10 when he and his family fled Nazi tyranny and left for the United States on the last passenger ship out of Hamburg, Germany before World
War II, arriving in the US in March, 1938. In 1961, he was elected to the New York City Council, and was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 where he served until his death.
The bill was passed in October, though there was little fanfare. Even so, it didn’t escape the attention of a cadre of community activists and Councilman Barron. To counter the government’s initiative, Barron and his cohorts decided to rename the building in honor of the great statesman Frederick Douglass, who escaped from bondage in the 1840s.
“We have told people that each time they go by the building to remember that it’s the Frederick Douglass Building,” said Barron, who is also a member of the Committee of Descendants of the African Burial Ground. “No matter what they may choose to call it, for us it will always be the Frederick Douglass Building.”
“And Frederick Douglass is a far more fitting name, given the site contains the bones of our ancestors,” Daughtry added. “This is a disgrace and we don’t plan to give in until something is done about it.”