Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

  In an effort to stimulate much needed growth in our community, I want to take up the challenge of turning this Bedford Stuyvesant community around. I grew up in this neighborhood and have not seen the type of progress that I believe should have taken place. I want to do my utmost to evoke aggressive change and a dynamic in this neighborhood that will galvanize the black community and have all of us in a productive mindset. Our positive entities and people are limited and we do an excessive amount of lip service and neglect real service to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters. I am personally tired of talking about what we are going to do. We need to take action Massive economic growth for black people is a top priority for me and I am willing to work hard and long to see that our financial base and knowledge of finances is exponentially increased.
We as a people have to be ruthless and obsessive about our own self-interest. Do not let music and sports be our only areas of exceptional development. We have obligations to ourselves and to those that made our position in this country more livable, pray that we can meet on some common ground and really start forging a better future. We have come a very long way and yet, we must still keep going.
Wayne M. Devonish

Some of the answers to the question: “Where are the African-American venues?”, can be found at Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration.   At Restoration Plaza, you have a choice of venues, including the Billie Holiday Theatre, an outdoor arena, the Skylight Gallery, Fort Greene Senior Center, and traditional community rooms.  With on-site parking and 24 hr. security, Restoration is an excellent choice for affairs up to 200 people indoors, and more under a tent on the outdoor arena.  Call Ms. Kendra Day at (718) 636-6953.
Other venues include The Lab, Sapodilla Restaurant, Two Steps Down, Sugarhill, Henry House, Akbar Hall,  and the Akwaaba House. 
Our Time Press would like to list the commercial venues, as well as churches or community rooms that are suitable and available for affairs.  If you have such a facility, or know of one or more that give excellent service, give OTP a call at (718) 622-8093.

Caterers, Caterers, Caterers!
Our community has a number of excellent caterers who have track records of excellent service at a variety of venues.  If you’re planning an affair, give some of these folks a call and ask for their references.  King George Caterers was formerly known as Citiwide One-Stop and has catered countless affairs ranging from intimate parties to lavish banquets.  Crystal George renamed the business in memory of her grandfather and founder, Timothy George.  Crystal has vowed to carry on the family business, and has moved the business to new storefront facilities and will be offering a takeout menu in the near future.  Call Crystal at: (718) 774-8368.
On Myrtle Avenue, Doris and Shimroy Johnson of Sapodilla offer  a wonderfully intimate space for  small parties, and offer white-glove off-site catering with their menu or yours.  Call Doris at (718) 797-1213.
Also on Myrtle, you’ll find the Five Spot Soul Food Restaurant (718) 852-0202 and Sprinkles Caribbean Takeout (718) 399-3085.  Both of these establishments have provided platters and trays of food on short notice for family gatherings at the writers home, and we’ve never received anything but compliments.

A Look at the Black Press
By Errol T. Louis

My life as a journalist started with a bang in the summer of 1982: a front-page story in The New York Amsterdam News. I was 19 years old, and it was the first time one of my stories was published professionally.  I bought up as many copies as I could carry that Thursday, and went around happily handing them out to friends, family and neighbors. The front page of the Amsterdam News!
As it turned out, people were a little thrown off by the gift I was proudly bestowing on them.  Maybe it was the headline of my story: POLICE BREAK CHILD SEX RING IN BROOKLYN.  And here I was, shoving it in people’s faces: Look!  They ran my article on the front page!  The usual response was a polite, “Um, yes, uh, very nice.”
But for an aspiring writer born in Harlem, it didn’t get much better.  For me, it wasn’t just the start of a career: it was history.  In the 1940’s, when my father was a boy, he’d sold the AmNews on the streets of Harlem to make a little extra money.  In high school, when I wrote school reports on the civil rights movement, I’d spend hours at the Schomburg, looking at back issues of the Amsterdam News from 1968 and 1969.
As a journal of record for New York’s African-American community-especially in Harlem-nothing matches the history, prestige and all-around popularity of the Amsterdam News, which has been in print for 89 years.  But a host of younger black papers (including Our Time Press) are betting that there is a large and growing market for even more information outlets that are for, by and about the African-American community.
Some of these papers, like the Queens Voice, the New York Beacon and the Brooklyn-based Daily Challenge, have long provided general-interest news with an outer-borough perspective, largely by covering events outside of Harlem that might not make the Amsterdam.  The Challenge, in fact, has 25 years under its belt as the city’s only black daily newspaper.  The New York CaribNews has built a solid following by supplying vital news to New York’s Caribbean community-everything from Brooklyn politics to sports, culture and exchange rates throughout the Caribbean.  Readers of French have long flocked to the Haiti Observateur and Haiti Progress.
But another wave of black newspapers has appeared in recent years. These newest newspapers tend to zero in on different segments within the black community.  The Brooklyn-based Network Journal focuses on business; the New York World covers arts and entertainment; and the Christian Times carries stories about black churches throughout the city.  A brand new paper, EboniX Communications, made its premiere in January of this year and is distinguished by, among other things, its advocacy of teaching methods that use African-American vernacular, or “Ebonics.”  Another new paper, the African Press, is targeted at the many immigrants from the motherland who have settled in New York and are looking for news from home.
Many of these new papers are distributed free within a neighborhood, to ensure a solid readership, which, in turn, helps attract advertisement.  Despite its name, for example the Crown Heights News is dropped at stores and supermarkets in Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Prospect Heights and Ft. Greene.  Our Time has a Brooklyn flavor but is distributed in Westchester and Harlem, as well.
Where did all this activity come from?  For one thing, advances in computer technology have made it cheaper and easier than ever for entrepreneurs to start a newspaper. Ten years ago, cutting, pasting and editing newspaper text used to require a typesetter that could easily cost $25,000 or more.  Today, layout can be done with a $600 desktop publishing software package and a $400 laser printer.
Virtually anyone with a personal computer can automate key functions like editing and laying out stories. Writers can now write, spell-check, edit and file stories electronically, eliminating yet another costly set of face-to-face meetings with editors and the time-consuming retyping of articles.  This article, for example, will be composed, edited and sent to the publisher over a phone line within minutes.  And although I’m sending it from a brownstone in Brooklyn, I could just as well be sitting in Paris, Dakar or Hong Kong.

Now that publishing is easier, we are seeing a revival of the great tradition of small, scrappy publishers submitting their vision and views to the public.  The result is a wonderful, noisy marketplace of ideas.  Every month, for less than $10, you can buy five or six daily, weekly and monthly African-American newspapers, and check out a broad spectrum of ideas, from true-blue capitalism (the Network Journal) to die-hard nationalism (The Final Call, published by the Nation of Islam).
All this activity continues a tradition that dates back to 1827, when John Russwurm began publishing Freedom’s Journal and calling for an end to slavery.  The paper’s slogan declared, in Biblical tones, “Righteousness Exalteth a Nation.”  Frederick Douglass, in the same abolitionist tradition, took $1,000 he earned from sales of his autobiography and began publishing the North Star in 1847.  By the time of the civil war, more than 40 black newspapers were being published-not simply to report routine news, but to argue a point, with passion and urgency.
From that time forward, every significant strand of African-American opinion has found expression in a paper of one type or another.  Labor activist A. Philip Randolph published The Messenger.  The legendary Harlem minister and congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., started The People’s Voice in 1942.  In any given week-side by side with Powell’s fiery editorials attacking condition in New York City-you might find poems or essay by the likes of Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson or Ann Petry.
The fact that most of these papers no longer exist is hardly a cause for mourning.  Frederick’s North Star was a crusade for the end of slavery, and stopped publishing once its purpose had been served.  By the same token, Powell’s rise to national prominence gave him the raw power needed to make changes in Harlem-and made The People’s Voice less of a necessity.  And, in the end, there was always the Amsterdam-as feisty, funky and opinionated as its tens of thousands of loyal readers

At this meeting several parents made presentations and Chancellor Crew assigned a person from his office to more fully hear their concern. 
Tireless activist Carol Taylor spoke on the topic of police in the schools.  because you are only allowed three minutes, her list of names of young men killed by police had to be cut off.  
These names should not be forgotten, and we give them to you for the record.
“No Blue Fools in Our Schools”Carol Taylor

 ” I hereby lodge the strongest possible protest against cops in our children’s public schools! 
The police of NYC are no longer role models:
* In 1989 they rioted; (egged on by Giuliani)
*The police are already invasively using the kids’ pictures with their mug books.
*Most of the schools that already have cops, over 130 of them, are  Black schools!
*Our children understand the fearsome certainty that cops don’t shoot white males in the back!
*The Black community fights the cop intimidation on the streets – our kids do not need to face oppressive psychological and physical intimidation in their schools! 
 *We taxpayers have already paid out over Ninety-Eight Million Dollars in jury award or settlements for police brutality during “Giuliani Time”.
*The majority of brutality/terrorism by cops involves Black Africans-mostly Black African males!
*If Chancellor Crew had incorporated our Racism Quotient Test Program – we asked him to four years ago, and as we repeatedly ask the NYPD to use on its racist/colorist cops before they’re let loose on our citizenry – we wouldn’t need this Hearing on cops in our schools! The following incomplete list of cop-murdered Black males is the best reason for no cops in our schools:
 Nicholas Heyward*, Peter Bailey*, Kevin Cedeno*, William Whitfield, Timothy Hudson, Joseph Stevens, Nathaniel Gaines, Jr.*, Steve Excell*, Anthony Rosario*, Hilton Vega*, Johnny Cromartie, Jonnie Gammage, Malice Green, John Afrika, Abdul Mateen, Ed Perry, Antwar Sedgwick, Christopher Wade, Ernest Sayon, Eric Thomas, Eric Pitt, Reginald Bannerman, Rudy Buchanan, Malik Jones, Shawn Montague, Richard Austin, Joseph Stevens, Arthur Miller, Arthur McDuffie, Don Taylor, Michael Taylor, Michael Stewart, Michael Donald, Michael Clark, Michael Phillips-Phillip, Pannell, Douglas Fischer, Sean Bennett, Nicholas Bartlett, Anthony Baez, Allan Blanchard, Keshawn Watson, Keith Richardson, Charles Campbell, Jason Nichols, Dario Diodonet Mohammad Assassa, Stoney Huggee, Abe Richardson, Juan Rodriquez, Steven Kelly, Kathurima Mwaria, Dennis Gross, Shu’Aib Latif, Laurence Meyers, John Jordan, Thomas Branch, James Baker-Paul Trotman, Bobby Rodriguez, Morris Duncan, Annibal Carasquillo, Bernard Gardner, Julio Tar-quino, Joseph Gould, Julio Nunez, Joseph Orlando, Robin Williams, Owen Williams, William Leonard, Robert Tyler, Loyal Garner, Kevin Thorpe, Ronald Stokes, Warren Battle, Randy Evans, Clifford Glover, Jimmie Lee Bruce, Clement Lloyd, Cornell Warren, Jose Reyes, Winston Hood, William Green-Louis Baez, Arthur Slade, Dane Kemp, Andre London, Alfred Sanders, Demont Lawson, Casey Merchant/William Smith, John Kelly, Andel Amos, Roy Lee Jones, Richard Deem, Edmund Powell, Claude Reese, Hector Jones, Alfonso Fernandez, Jose LeBrun, Howard Caesar, Jay Parker, Abdul Salaam, Terrence Kean, Kenneth Simpson, Timothy Howell, Neville Johnson, Ricahrd Luke, Richard borden, Jesse Davis, Lester Yarbrough, Charles Stamper, Timothy Bolden, Tycel Nelson, Clarence Smith, Charles Burnett, Ricky McCargo, Joseph Robertson….(*Shot in the back.)

It is our earnest wish to make our Journal a medium of intercourse between our brethren in the different states of this great confederacy; that through its columns an expression of our sentiments, on many interesting subjects that concern us, may be offered to the public; that plans which apparently are beneficial may be candidly discussed and properly weighed; if worthy, receive our cordial approbation; if not, our marked disapprobation. 
Useful knowledge of every kind, and every thing that relates to Africa, shall find a ready admission into our columns; and as that vast continent becomes daily more known, we trust that many things will come to light, proving that the natives of it are neither so ignorant nor stupid as they have generally been supposed to be. 
And while these important subjects shall occupy the columns of the Freedom’s Journal, we would not be unmindful of our brethren who are still in the iron fetters of bondage.  They are our kindred by all the ties of nature; and though but little can be effected by us, still let our sympathies be poured forth, and our prayers in their behalf, ascend to Him who is able to succor them.
From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented.  Men whom we equally love and admire have not hesitated to represent us disadvantageously, without becoming personally acquainted with the true state of things, nor discerning between virtue and vice among us.  The virtuous part of our people feel themselves sorely aggrieved under the existing state of things – they are not appreciated.
Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us.  But our virtues are passed by unnoticed.  And what is still more lamentable, our friends, to whom we concede all the principles of humanity and religion, from these very causes seem to have fallen into the current of popular feeling and are imperceptively floating on the stream-actually living in the practice of prejudice, while they abjure it in theory, and feel it not in their hearts.  Is it not very desirable that such should know more of our actual condition, and of our efforts and feelings, that informing or allocating plans for our amelioration, they may do it more understandingly?  In the spirit of candor and humility we intend by a simple representation of facts, to lay our case before the public, with a view to arrest the progress of prejudice and to shield ourselves against the consequent evils.  We wish to conciliate all and to irritate none, yet we must be firm and unwavering to our principles, and persevering in our efforts.
If ignorance, poverty and degradation have hitherto been our unhappy lot; has the eternal decree gone forth, that our race alone, are to remain in this state, while knowledge and civilization are shedding their enlivening rays over the rest of the human family?  The recent travels of Denham and Clapperton in the interior of Africa, and the interesting narration which they have published; the establishment of the republic of Hayti after years of sanguinary warfare; its subsequent progress in all the arts of civilization; and the advancement of liberal ideas in South America, where despotism has given place to free governments, and where many of our brethren now fill important civil and military stations, prove the contrary. 
The interesting fact that there are five hundred thousand free persons of colour, one-half of whom might peruse, and the whole be benefitted by the publication of the Journal; that no publication, as yet, has been devoted exclusively to their improvement – that many selections from approved standard authors, which are within the reach of few, may occasionally be made – and more important still, that this large body of our citizens has no public channel- all serve to prove the real necessity, at present, for the appearance of the Freedom’s Journal.
It shall ever be our desire so to conduct the editorial department of our paper as to give offense to none of our patrons; as nothing is farther from us than as to make it the advocate of any partial views, either in politics or religion.  What few days we can number, have been devoted to the improvement of our brethren; and it is our earnest wish that the remainder may be spent in the same delightful service. 
In conclusion, whatever concerns us as a people, will every find a ready admission into the Freedom’s Journal, interwoven with all the principle news of the day.
And while everything in our power shall be performed to support the character of our Journal, we would respectfully invite our numerous friends to assist by their communications, and our coloured brethren to strengthen our hands by their subscriptions, as our labour is one of common cause, and worthy of their consideration and support.  And we do most earnestly solicit the latter, that if at any time we should seem to be zealous, or too pointed in the inculcation of any important lesson, they will remember, that they are equally interested in the cause in which we are engaged, and attribute our zeal to the peculiarities of our situation, and our earnest engagedness in their well being. 
The Editors