Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

By Marie Alexander
Last night I went to the first annual fund-raiser for BEOC, Brooklyn Educational Opportunity Center where Dr. Lois Blades-Rosado is dean and executive director.  This was a fund-raiser and a Latin Jazz Concert but I’ll get to that later.
It’s said the person/persons at the top set the tone. Well, it’s true. The reception was held  at  the Keyspan Building  and  from the moment I arrived, Dr. Rosado and the director of the benefit, Pat Williams, were there at the reception table to greet their guests with smiles, handshakes and genuine warmth. Those ladies make you feel special. Here’s something. Dr. Rosado told us (my friend and I ) where to get designer clothes cheap. Thanks girl.
You know they had some bigwigs in the house, including on the short list: Charles Koehler, Pres. Community Capital Bank, Gina Bolden-Rivera, sr. v.p. Community Capital Bank; Stuart Leffler, mgr. Economic Development, Con Edison; Nia Rock, v. p. Independence Bank and Down State Medical Martha Thomas, and AVP Community & Govt. Relations, SUNY, Downstate.   Kudos to the staff and all the behind the scenes people. We know that without you……….
The food was dee-lish and there was plenty of it. Don’t you just hate when you’re a pleasingly plump person…….aw hell ..fat and someone makes a comment to  no one in particular “Where’s the diet food?” Well people, a good looking-gentleman whose suit looked as if it had been painted on his body made that comment. He made it while I was sampling some rugulah. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
About 8pm we migrated over to the auditorium at New York City Technical College. Bobbi Humphrey and Eddie Palmeri were the featured artists. Ya’all  didn’t hear me so I’m gonna say it again. Bobbi Humphrey and Eddie Palmeri were the featured artists. Bobbi  Humphrey, somehow I can’t bring myself to call her Bobbi or Miss Humphrey. I have to say the whole name. At the reception I met Bobbi Humphrey at the beverage table (no speculation here, people) and we just fell into this friendly banter like we already knew each other.  People, the woman’s all right .
Folks, for those of you who were not at New York Tech. You missed it. Bobbi Humphrey rocked. Girlfriend did it. When she played Lionel Richie’s song “Hello”, whereever she went, she took the audience with her. It was like one of those “Scottie, beam me up and back” moments. Even typing this all I can do is just shake my head when I think about it. Yes, she was that bad.  Bobbi Humphrey played about five songs. “Harlem River Drive”  and  “Comin Home” by Herbie Mann to name a few. I have to speak on her trio of musicians.  Terri Thomas on piano. Someone needs to kiss that brother’s fingers. He went into a solo piece  that was so fabulous that  Eddie Palmeri came out from the back and stood in the wings to listen to this man. Lenny Covington on drums. The audience gave the drummer some and he put sneakers  on and ran with it. Gregory Kilpatrick on bass guitar. Same thing. Gregory rocked us with that driving bass beat. People, you missed it.
      Enter the Maestro!
Eddie Palmeri.  Where are all my people who dance or used to dance Latin? Holla!!  Does anyone out there remember  Eddie Palmeri and his conjunto ” La perfecta?” El Molestoso? Let’s go back people to the 60’s. If I’m dating myself, so be it. I lived it , loved it and on Friday night, October  24th, I lived and loved it again. La Maestro came out sat down at the piano and the band was off and running. After the first 4 notes played,  people were out of their seats and  dancing in front of the stage. And that’s where they stayed until El  Maestro finished . I was watching Eddie direct his band with  hand and finger movements that were imperceptible. I would have missed them if I wasn’t watching carefully.  Carefully? My eyes were glued on the man. If you’re wondering if I danced, my response to you is, does a bear mess in the woods?   Yes, Eddie played Azucar. Not the way we remember but with a Latin jazz beat. He tore it up.  Eddie grabbed us, held us until he was ready to let us go. The horn solos had us mesmerized as well as the congas, timbales and bass.  Again, people, you missed a goody.
Remember there’s always next year. Hope to see you there.  Oh, Bobbi Humphrey, if you still want to know where I got my coat, call me at  the paper.
Peace.

By Marlon McRae
Mo’ Better outlasted Another Level, 8-5, in eight innings to win the decisive fifth game of the series on Oct. 19 at Kingston Park and another Brooklyn United Softball Association title.
 “This was hectic,” said commissioner John Calhoun. “It was an excellent series, the last two games going into extra innings. This was one of the best series I have seen in this park in a long time. It’s just too bad somebody has to lose.”
Salaam hit a grand slam for Mo’ Better in the top of the eighth inning to put them ahead, 8-4, and give them the lead for good.
    “It [home run] was awesome,” said Mo’ Better player/manager Chris LeGree. “It’s funny, that was a guy that was struggling, but I stuck with him.” Another Level scratched out another run in the bottom of the inning, but fell short.
They took the first game of the series 6-4. Mo’ Better won the next two games with scores of 10-7 and 11-6. Games 1and 2 were played on Oct. 5 while the final three games were played two weeks later.
    Game 4 might have been the most exciting contest of all. Mo’ Better could have put the series away but squandered several opportunities. They took a 6-4 lead into the bottom of the seventh inning but a two-run homer by Another Level’s Derek Oliver aka D.O. tied the score at 6-6 and sent the game into extra innings.
    Another Level took a 7-6 lead in the top of the eighth inning when Vince Williams scored from first on a two-out single to short right-center field.
Mo’ Better responded by tying the score in the bottom of the inning. Another Level added two more runs in the top of the ninth to build a 9-7 lead. It appeared that Mo’ Better would tie it up again in the bottom of the ninth, they scored a run and managed to get runners on first and second base with one out. But LeGree pinch-ran for Jerome Blackman and made a costly blunder on the bases.
A slow grounder was hit toward first base. Instead of advancing to third base LeGree stopped midway between second and third base. After getting the runner at first, Another Level threw to second and tagged LeGree, getting the final out and forcing a Game 5.
 “We had an injured player,” said LeGree. “I didn’t want to further damage him physically and I wasn’t mentally prepared. That was bad.” But Mo’ Better responded like true champions in the final game to win their 11th title in 12 seasons.
The victory by Mo’ Better was an upset considering that Another Level were a league-best 26-1 during the regular season and had home field advantage. They also featured  former members of Mo’ Better on their roster.
“Yeah, that’s tough [the loss],” said Oliver. “We had them on the ropes- we was the home team and we should have won. But it didn’t pan out that way.” “But like Chris LeGree said, it was ‘Going to come down to a home run’ and that’s just what happened a home run was the difference. I tip my hat off to them.”
While many of the members of the first Mo’ Better championship are no longer a part of the team, Blackman and LeGree have been mainstays and members of each championship team.
    Winning year after year might be a bore for some, but for LeGree, each championship victory has been sweeter than the last.     “It feels good,” said LeGree. “It always feels good. This one felt just as good as the first one did 10 years ago.”
So just how long will LeGree continue to play and keep his stranglehold on the BUSA title?
“I plan on continuing as long as I still have the competitive edge to compete,” said LeGree. “I like the action. I like being on a winning team. I love competing and I’ve been blessed with a lot of athletes that love to compete also.”
As for Another Level, they can always look ahead to next season and hope to have a better outcome. But don’t count on all of its members returning.  “Next year, who knows?” Said Oliver.  “I might be somewhere else. I love playing with these guys but sometimes you have to move on to another team.”

Entering the lobby of the Summerfield Suites in Atlanta, Friday evening, October 10th, one did

not have to ask where the EAST Sisterhood Reunion was being held.   The hum of spirited conversation led to the meeting room gradually filling as 40 women arrived from Arizona,

California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and South Carolina carrying photo albums and other memorabilia.
Oseye Mchawi says, “As each sister arrived you could feel the genuine excitement in the warm greeting.  It was electrifying.   Muslimah Mashariki was affected the same way. “When we arrived on Friday night the energy in the room was overwhelming.  It gave me goose pimples to see so many sisters and to feel the love and warmth from each sister.”
The Reunion’s Genesis
In the fall of 2002, Abimbola Wali and Martha Bright, on staff at Fort Valley University, were asked to do a presentation on the EAST Sisterhood for a Council of Black Independent Institutions conference.  A flurry of shared experiences and memories ensued via the Internet, initiating the idea for a reunion.  A reunion committee composed of members in Brooklyn, Florida and Georgia met the challenge.
Some of these women had not seen each other for 20 or more years, some had not known each other at all.  Shukuru Copeland, describing the bonding, said, “We all have a shared history.”  And indeed they do.  They were a part of a historical venture and adventure that emanated from 10 Claver Place, Brooklyn.
The EAST: A Mighty Tree
Rooted in Education
A nationalist/Pan -African organization, the EAST evolved from the national activism of the civil rights Era and locally by Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle for community control of its schools.   In 1964, a group of teachers, headed by Al Vann and Jitu Weusi, formed ATA (African-American Teachers Association).  It was complemented by the establishing, three years later, of ASA (African-American Students Association). 1968 was the year that ushered the EAST into existence. Several things happened that pointed to the need for an independent educational and cultural institution. When ASA, in conjunction with ATA, held their first Malcolm X memorials, Weusi, a teacher at Brooklyn’s JHS 35, took a class to Harlem and was charged with insubordination and transferred to the OceanHill-Brownsville district. 
The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) called two strikes protesting the OceanHill-Brownsville Demonstration District, where parents had been given autonomy and could hire staff.      Student organizers were suspended from school when ASA organized a student strike to protest the Board of Education’s settling with the UFT. 
Emboldened by their own spirit of self-determination and encouraged by community support, the activists finalized the plans for the EAST and found and renovated a vacant building to serve as its home.  On New Year’s Eve of 1969, the EAST opened to the public with a jazz concert featuring vocalist Leon Thomas.
The first order of business after the opening was the educating of students suspended from school because of their activism.  In February of 1970 ATA members taught evening GED prep classes and in April Uhuru Sasa (Freedom Now) School opens with six students.  The Afro-centric curriculum attracted local parents and by the fall term the school grew to three student levels: preschool, elementary and high school.
Because its members were early disciples of Kawaida and Dr. Maulana Karenga, the EAST is credited as being one of the first organizations to bring Kwanzaa to the east coast.  In the spirit of Kujichagulia (self-determination) and Ujamaa (cooperative economics), a number of institutions were brought into existence.  These included a newspaper, Black News, Pyramid Printing Press, Imani Day Care, East Caterers, SweeTeast Restaurant, Akiba Mkuu Bookstore, Uhuru Food Coop, Mavasi, a clothing store, and a cultural center hosting weekend performances by jazz artists coupled with poetry, dance and lectures.  The International Afrikan Arts Festival, now in its 31st year, began as a fund-raiser for Uhuru Sasa.
From 1969 – 1985 the women gathered in Atlanta had played a major role in each of the operations.  They had borne their babies (nation-building) together.  Imani Day Care was initially an answer to the needs of these women who needed child care so they could perform their jobs at the EAST.   Then as in the case of Uhuru Sasa, it grew to serve the community at large.
To Educate a Woman
is to Teach a Nation
 The women who came to the EAST did so for many reasons:  Some were attracted by the political activism, some the African cultural practices, others by the jazz in an intimate all-Black setting, still others by the handsome brothers swarming to The EAST.  Mothers said they came looking for a school to instill and reinforce African pride in their children.
Isoke Nia Kierstedt held on to a copy of Black News until her oldest daughter was three, when she enrolled her in Uhuru Sasa.  Isoke said she was immediately recruited to attend the teacher training and spent the next ten years teaching at Uhuru Sasa.  She is now director of research and development for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and the founder of All Write Literacy Consultants.
Many of the women returned to public education after leaving the EAST.  Ngina Blackshear is now a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.  Working within the New York City public school system are Afiya Dawson, Akilah Raysor, Roberta Raysor, Mama Wambui and Amaka Conner. 
Some formed other independent schools, two of which are still functioning.  Fela Barclift opened Little Sun People Early Childhood Development and Little Sun People Too!, both in Brooklyn.  Ayanna Johnson is the founder of Weusi Shule in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, now known as Johnson Preparatory School. 
From 1970-1985,   Brooklyn was home to Mapanduzi, Robert Conner Memorial School and Zidi Kuwa founded by Rashida Kierstedt Jacobs.  In 1980, Mafori Moore and her sister Edinau Gibson took the Pan- Africanist school movement to Harlem, opening Mwamko Wa Siasa.
The EAST’s Second Generation
A recent EAST Family newsletter, published by the EAST Family Kwanzaa Reunion Committee, listed 52 of these young people as college graduates, ten enrolled in graduate school and nine in undergraduate studies.
These young adults are found in a wide range of careers:  social work, accountants,  film, dance, photography, music, fashion design, management, law, health and education. Kemba McHawi and Opio Mashariki are on staff at colleges.   Kafi M. Carrasco is principal of Harambee Prep in Pasadena, CA.   At least eight are employed in New York City schools in administrative, guidance and teaching roles.   A few are community activists.
Mwamko Wa Siasa’s motto was “Vijana wetu watajenga taifa letu “Swahili for “Our youth will build our nation.”  The sisters say that Uhuru Sasa and the other independent schools that taught African pride prepared children for that role.

  When asked what impact the EAST experience had on her life, Isoke, answered, “It made me a teacher.  It also gave me the African cultural identity that I needed to make it in America.  You just do better in the world when you know who you are.”
For a detailed account of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville era, read The Strike that Changed New York by Jerald E. Podair

Professor William H. Mackey Jr. has been a source of information and inspiration since the beginning of Our Time Press.  Now Professor Mackey, 83, is at Veterans Memorial Hospital  in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. 
In a recent visit with the professor, he gave these words: “You never think about the time you’ve wasted until you have no more time to waste.”   Watchful words from a master teacher whose life, as Bernice Green’s reprinted essay shows, has not been wasted at all.
There will be a tribute to the professor Saturday November 8th at Medgar Evers College (See announcement on this page.) 
  DG

We expected our first interview with Professor William Mackey, Jr. to last 45 minutes, centering around the erudite history scholar’s take on the differences – if any – between storytelling and the study of history. A few minutes into our session, Professor Mackey detoured into a What-Time-Is-It reality check (for our benefit) with lessons in Mackey’s Basic Economics, Basic Math and Social Studies. It’s the same thing he does for the community with his free lectures Thursday evenings in the basement of 850 St. Marks Avenue in Brooklyn.
Four hours passed, and we had not even cracked the surface in our planned exploration of the man and his missions.
See, when you’re traveling with Professor Mackey, there’s no telling what you will find, who you will meet or how long the journey will take.
On the way, you pick up some fundamental lessons in Black survival for an African future. It’s part of a life course Mackey believes everyone in the Village has prerequisites for, from birth. It’s a course the professor still takes himself.
Mackey has journeyed to a number of worlds without ever leaving the village. In the community he is known for his scholarship and his skills as an educator.
In the literary world he is respected for his writings, and, his scholarship: He is a linguist; five languages, but he speaks “only Ebonics in public.” He has an assortment of degrees; one is in the science of structural engineering.
In a nationwide poll in the 70’s he was voted one of the top ten photojournalists in the world. Some of his poignant images of the Black experience appear in the critically acclaimed “Eye of Conscience,” a tribute to these renowned photographers. A musicologist whose record library includes Big Band to Beethoven; Mozart to Miles, Mackey can sing, too. He founded –are you ready?– “The Fernandina Florida Gospelaires” and performed lead. His tenor solos rocked Jacksonville, Florida’s famous Bethel Baptist Institutional Church where he created its popular glee club. Music was a staple -along with poetry, drama, jazz and good eats — of  Les Deux Megots, the cafe he owned on East 7th Street in Greenwich Village during the Beat Generation era. Mackey’s cozy spaces — he owned several of them –were frequented by artists, poets, dancers and Off-  Broadway and out-of-work actors and actresses. Harold Cruse managed Megots for him and James Baldwin, Moses Gunn, Robert Earl Jones-father of James, Frances Foster, Robert Hooks, Graham Brown, Ted Jones and many other greats, hung out and performed there. Amiri Baraka was a regular and recited his poetry over what is now called open mic.
Mackey is a contributing editor to the Encyclopedia of Black America (the Negro Almanac) and to the Pictorial History of Black America, in which some of his photographs appear.   His incisive introduction to Barnes & Noble’s 1995 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin  is a first.  The book has been in print since 1852 and this is the first time an African -American has written a critical analysis of the work. 
You can find   Mackey’s loving tribute to  Langston Hughes on this year’s Literary Desk Calendar. The 1998 Literary Calendar will feature Mackey’s panegyric to Baldwin.
(Mackey has never gotten over the death of his good friend. And he is trying to come to terms with the recent passing of the great Dr. Edward Scobie. Mackey will write about Scobie’s contributions.) 
Twice a week, on average, Mackey walks from Crown Heights across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. On some days he stops in lower Manhattan to teach at DC 37. Courses include: the History of Black Music; Race, Ethnocentricity and Linguistics; African History and Culture. On   other days he travels past Wall Street on foot another 40 blocks or so, uptown, to Empire State College. There, he unscrambles  minds on issues pertaining to world history,   U.S. Labor and Black History. For Mackey, 77, life truly is about journeys: preparing for them, having the right mindset for them, starting them and completing them. He’s very concerned that too many people do  not know how to get to first base. Therein lies the key to his personal mission:   “to open up minds.” 
“I’m here to show you how to think I’m not here to just teach,” he tells his “family” of students in his “Correcting the MisEducation Series” class at 850. But educate he does with refreshingly honest and irreverent diagnoses of an unwell world  “gone crazy”. This evening, Mackey is discoursing on “The Role of Race and Ethnocentrism in Cultural Linguistics (Speaking in Tongues)”.  He is in control, leading  his discussion like a conductor – music or train.  Yet the griot-patriarch seeks guidance, too: to convey his message and carry his followers into various worlds of knowledge.
Before each Thursday class, he meditates alone in his apartment tower surrounded by spectacular pyramids of books, cassettes and audiotapes. Buried under one heap is an upright, still in tune, piano waiting for Mackey to play it again.  The books are so pristine, so new-looking  you wonder if Mackey simply inhales the knowledge without touching the pages. And more books in the dining room, on the windowsill, in Barnes & Noble shopping bags, in every inch of space except a couple of  necessary paths. And still more books: all stamped carefully with the Mackey imprimatur and waiting for their place on the shelves of a library Mackey will build in Georgia as a memorial to his grandmother, Harriet  Weston.
Mackey takes the results of his reflections downstairs to his Mack-free classes.  These are Multi-Afrikan Culturally Kemetic free classes where Mackey’s occasional socially incorrect locutions are in a comfort zone with his readings from word-and-thought-masters he respects, including Dr.  John Henrik Clarke, Malcolm X, Howard Zinn, Shakespeare, Mrs. Weston. As many  as 35 students on various Thursdays are held captive by the professor’s iconoclastic humor, down-home wit, idol-smashing curveballs. Laughter drowns the wooshing noises of the washers and dryers across from the community room. Mackey is shooting holes in the media’s main “Story- of-the-Week”, analyzing it from a fact perspective. He draws parallels between the Ollie Northcrack thing and England’s Opium Wars coverups. He interweaves history with real- world happenings, and makes it sound like poetry. He is a consummate storyteller, and he draws us in. He inspires us to make mental notes to checkout the Britannicas on our bookshelves, and get into this global history, a feat which eluded our past so-called educators. We are learning. “The education system has a long history of dehumanizing people,” Mackey says. “The truth is not being put out there. It’s a continuing struggle trying to steer away from misdirection and mis-education. It’s so easy to delude ourselves into thinking that what we are being told is what really is. Positive insanity is the only rational outlet. I believe we can do it ourselves, and learn everything we need to know right in the village. It’s not a new way of thinking. But I would never tell you what to think. I will advise you not to compartmentalize anything. Everything ties in. Knowledge is all around, if you use all your senses, you’ll find it. ”
A young SUNY college student on winter break is listening to Professor Mackey with cautious attention. The class is a release from the madness on her upstate campus where white students have smeared racist graffiti on the walls and dormitory doors. The following week, the young woman brings her mother to meet Mackey. The mother expresses her gratefulness, informing him that her daughter is returning to school with a new resolve and some tangibles -newspaper clips, tapes and book lists from Mackey’s class to share with the other Black students. “My daughter says she met the smartest people here in your class.” Mackey’s mindful assistant professor Gloria Walker overhears, and promises to ask Mackey if he would establish workshops for young people.
Class readings are pulled from the newspapers each week, and distributed to each participant. Before the sessions’ end, Beverly provides the class with impactful information on happenings outside and within the village. This night, she announces the existence of job openings in the transit system. Mackey immediately calls on transit employee R. to give a summation or “translation” of “the real deal. R. strides up in full uniform  and offers a read-between-the-lines commentary. He’s brilliant, in his way. Yet  T-Bear a truly sweet man, interrupts. “Are you talkin’ Ebonics, man?” Elder Mackey   cuts a laser eye in T-Bear’s direction. The class is heedful. T-Bear downshifts. R. continues without a missed beat. We’re all learning.
Mackey believes everyone in the village is special. It’s a sentiment his maternal grandma bestowed upon him. The elder Harriet (Sibley) Weston, born enslaved in 1854, decided she would raise her grandson because he was “a special child.” In those days, he says, children didn’t question their mothers. Didn’t matter whether the mother   was grown, a teacher and had good sense.   Which aptly describes Mrs. Blanche Mackey when her mother took her two-year-old son from Jacksonville, Fla., to raise on her 50-acre farm in the Black village of Scarlett, in Camden County, Georgia. Bill learned the sorts of pastoral things that illumine life and carries one through it. Under his grandmother’s conscious eye: he learned how to grow things: corn, rice, yams… Just as she grew him and taught him the value of simplicity and sustenance in a complicated and unsustaining world. (Mackey’s family never sold their land in the South.)
Mackey read every book there was to read in Scarlett, and when he ran out of books (most rural Black schools were like the two room dwelling Mackey attended — 10 years behind without a library to speak of, he would pick from the ground books discarded as trash by less-poor white schools. (The same way he picks up pennies dropped from worn pockets and loose purses every now and then.) Young Mackey treasured these finds. He would dust them off and store their precious shards of knowledge in his photographic memory.
When he completed the highest grade – (because of Jim Crow, back in the 20’s and 30’s in the South, the highest grade a Black child could reach was the 6th or 8th grade, if you were lucky) Bill Mackey, by then a   teenage bibliophile, returned to his parent’s home in the big city of Jacksonville to continue his education. Summers he spent in Scarlett. It was during one of those  vacations that, Bill, at age 14, taught his grandmother to read and to write. Mrs. Weston was in her 90’s.
Back then, people “had more pride, more dignity and a sense of history,” he told a  reporter in 1985. “They maintained a respect for education that was absolutely awesome.” But racism has always been on a head-on collision course with the ancestors’ love for education and their children’s pursuit of it.  In one of the nation’s largest cities, Black students had no access to the main library in  the 30’s.  And Bill had run out of books to read in the smaller, poorer Black libraries. In 1936, Mrs. Clara White, an ombudsman for the Black community, a friend of Mary McLeod Bethune and one of Jacksonville’s first Black social  workers,  spearheaded a campaign to open the city’s main library to Black children.  Black people who lived in towns like Columbus, Ga.– Dr. John Henrik Clarke’s hometown, — had to go in through the back door.  “A library card to us,” says Mackey, “was like a credit card, a passport, that’s how  valuable it was then.”
Mrs. White, Blanche Mackey and other  sympathizers and activists went the distance and won a small victory: Mackey was able to visit the library on Thursdays between 12 noon and 3pm. Only on Thursdays. 
To this day, the professor believes that “one chapter, paragraph or sentence can make a book worthwhile.” And the value of Mackey’s own literary life work will never be underestimated either. It is a treasure entitled, Down Home: Return to the Georgia Backwoods. This 550-page study of Black life in the lower coastal Carolinas, Georgia and Florida is both a voluminous work of research culled from 3,000 hours of interviews and 6,000 photographs that combine with his own remembrances. It venerates the land tilled and hoed by the ancestors’ hands and shows how “we have taken the garbage and refuse of Western society (and mixed it with the ancestors’ sweat and blood –this writer’s comment) and made it art.”
Yet, Mackey is very much concerned about the waste that weighs some of us down. The wasting of minds, the wasting of time.
We were nervous the morning of the scheduled first interview. Twenty minutes late and fumbled with the audio tape  “This stuff oughtta been done on the way here,” he barks. “And now you sittin’ here doin yaw preliminary preliminaries. Thank God, we didn’t decide to take over the country this morning.”
After the interview, Mackey sets out to walk us to the IND station at the Kingston Throop stop. After all, he has to pickup his copy of The New York Slimes, as he calls it — he reads it everyday! — and The Daily Challenge. He’s grumbling about how he’s lost pennies on account of us. Seems folks drop them on their way to work in the morning. And don’t place any value in them–enough to stop and pick them up. He’s concerned about us keeping warm. We enter the subway at the Uptown side to meet the train that will take us one stop to Utica. There we can get the express running downtown to our stop. This is Mackey’s idea.
In the underground, we are introduced to regal Sofronia, the token booth collector, who dispenses the coins as deftly as she offers information on upcoming photo and fine arts exhibitions throughout Brooklyn and New York. We are learning.
Mackey says he will be seeing us soon.
As we enter the train, we realize we have not even reached first base in our talks with Mackey.  He is deep and there is so much. Two lecture sessions and one-half dozen ego-smashing phone calls later, we’re still trying to pass some kind of course. But we’re learning some basic lessons in survival: the importance of “going home” to detoxify the mind and unlearn the culture-crushing software that has been programmed in us. We also have rediscovered the value of a found penny. “It’s a 100% profit,” says Mackey. “Absolutely! – A found penny is a 100% profit!” Just like the burnished seeds of wisdom Mackey’s students are amassing in those free Thurs. day night lectures. We’re learning. Walking through histories. Listening. Absorbing. Catching up. Collecting sense. “‘It’s about time!” Mackey would say.

Prospect Plaza Tenants Association Speaks Out on Hope VI Situation
What happens to a dream hijacked?  It becomes HOPE VI at Prospect Plaza.  The original 2 « inch thick two-volume application details a plan of the best intentions.   It was a plan to revitalize people and housing.  It was an opportunity for people who haven’t had much of a first chance to have a second chance at life.  To take all that they’ve learned from the hard years, combine it with the training and the opportunities promised, and remake their lives, and by doing so, uplift the whole community. 
Instead, HOPE VI has been turned into a grotesque display of politicians, reverends and vendors, foxes watching the wolves watching the $100 million hen house.  The welfare of the residents is the last thing on their minds. And referring to the “community leaders” in that crew, the aiders and abetters in this crime, Prospect Plaza resident Gwendolyn Wilson said, “The last time my people heard from you, we ended up on a ship coming over here” They talk that talk about loving the people, but they can’t walk a straight line and follow a clear plan.  They can’t do it because everybody in their posse gets theirs only as long as NYCHA can do what it wants.  And so that the tri-headed monster of greed, White Supremacy and sheer bureaucratic callousness is being allowed to bring pain to the lives of people who are poor and Black.
This monster, as always, uses technology as a weapon to prey on the weak.   Whether it is the Gatling gun against the spear or Outlook Express against a tenant organization given no phones and no training, the technology wins, they call it progress and that is what is happening at Prospect Plaza in Brooklyn, New York.
And now there is an added complication.  At a recent meeting of Community Board 3, attendees tell of derogatory comments directed at former residents of Prospect Plaza from some residents of the new housing at HOPE VI.  “Those N____ don’t need to come back,” is the level the discussion is reported to have devolved to.  This is fear talking and it has to be addressed.   These residents are not trespassers.  Their homes were always slated for market value sales.  They now have mortgages to pay while trying to raise children with decent friends.  They have to come home late from work, the second job, or classes to advance their position. They know what stress is and they don’t need more, particularly when it looks like what they were struggling so hard to leave.   
We spoke with officers of the Prospect Plaza Tenants Association, named in the original plan as the interface between the New York City Housing Authority and the tenants.  Present  were Milton Bolton, president, George Allen, vice president and Priscilla Davis.  We later spoke with other former residents including Gwendolyn Wilson by telephone.