By Amir Vera and Tricia Escobedo,
CNN
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a leader in America’s civil rights movement, died Friday.
He was 98.
Lowery’s death was confirmed by family representative Imara Canady, who said he died of natural causes.
Often called the “dean” of the civil rights movement, he worked hand in hand in the movement’s formative years with the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson.
He once said he missed “Martin” and other civil rights activists who had died before him. But he felt that God was keeping him for a single cause: To address the injustices of the criminal justice system, particularly toward poor black men.
“It’s the last facet here of racial oppression,” Lowery once said of the American criminal justice system.
Police encounter led to a career in civil rights
Joseph Echols Lowery was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on October 6, 1921. His father owned a small business, and his mother was a part-time schoolteacher. He married Evelyn Gibson in 1950. The couple had three daughters, and Lowery had two sons from a previous marriage.
His hometown was typical of Southern mill villages of the 1920s, where racial lines were well-defined and the Ku Klux Klan used cross burnings and other scare tactics against African-Americans.
Lowery said it was an encounter with a policeman at his father’s sweets shop when he was 12 or 13 years old that triggered his desire to work as a civil rights activist.
“A big white policeman was coming in, and he punched me in the stomach with his nightstick,” Lowery told the Atlanta Tribune magazine in 2004.
“He said, ‘Get back n—–. Don’t you see a white man coming in the door?’”
After graduating from college, Lowery became an ordained Methodist minister who served congregations in Alabama and Georgia. He later became a peace activist, joining the fight against segregation and organizing marches in Selma and Birmingham, Alabama.
He served nearly half a century as a pastor, spending much of that time with Central United Methodist and Cascade United Methodist in Atlanta, Georgia.
Lowery was a co-founder of the SCLC
In 1957, as racial tensions rose across the United States, Lowery helped start the Southern Christian Leadership Conference civil rights organization with King. Their work helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which President Lyndon Johnson signed.
“We had been through sit-ins and kneel-ins where we had been beat up and locked up and cussed out and locked out,” Lowery said in a 1994 interview. “It was a milestone, a watershed. It helped America take off the cloak of official segregation.”
Lowery later served as the SCLC’s president for more than two decades, leading protests for civil rights in South Africa and peace in the Middle East.
He remained an activist even after retiring in 1992, fighting for gay rights and election reform, and against capital punishment.
“We had to remain ever vigilant … and energetic to protect those rights, lest the clock be turned back,” Lowery said.
He vowed never to seek political office, like some of his fellow activists, because he said he could achieve more for the civil rights movement from among the people.
“He was a champion for civil rights, a challenger of injustice, a dear friend to the King family. Thank you, sir,” the King Center tweeted Friday night.
Bernice King also tweeted Friday saying it’s hard to imagine a world without Lowery.
“I’m grateful for a life well-lived and for its influence on mine. I’ll miss you, Uncle Joe,” she said.
Lowery was a recipient of the Medal of Freedom
Lowery started the Coalition for the People’s Agenda in 1998 to educate and register new voters, and he continued to be involved in the cause until his passing.
In 2006, he was criticized for playing politics at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., for railing against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
“We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there, but Coretta knew, and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here,” Lowery said. “Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor.”
Supporters said he merely echoed King’s sentiments against the bloodshed in Iraq.
Lowery received numerous honors late in life. He delivered the benediction at President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, and Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom six months later.
With all the accolades and honors he received during his lifetime, Lowery never stopped working to empower people to unite to fight for their rights.
“As one, we can poke you in the eye,” he told the Atlanta Tribune, holding up one finger, then shaping his hand into a fist. “But if we come together, we can knock you out.”
Joseph Lowery, Civil Rights Leader, dies at 98
A Quarantine Strategy
“Go Easy on Yourself: This is Hard”
I am writing this on Day 17 of our PAUSE City-wide quarantine. Like you, I have been pretty much sequestered in my home, taking trips to the store as needed, but pretty much in and around the house all day every day. Work, for me, now consists of Zoom video conferencing, phone calls and emails. I haven’t ordered take out in days, and that means that I’m cooking a lot more, and washing a lot more dishes. The pivot into a stay-at-home life has indeed been a bit of a challenge for me, as it has probably been for you. So, today I want to share with our readers some strategies that I’m learning to cope with this pandemic imprisonment. Without maintaining some form of system during this forced downtime, this thing has the potential to unravel and become a mess. Please feel free to email us some of the strategies you are using to get through! Send them to editors@ourtimeathome.com.
This Is NOT a Vacation
The first couple of days were fun. Schools were closed. Your job closed and allowed you to work from home, and in the confusion of the first few days, cycles were discarded. You stopped setting your alarm to go off at 6am because you no longer needed to get up to go to work. You started sleeping later. Without having to get up early during the week, you started going to bed later. And bit by bit, you’ve lost the stringent regiment that you would follow week in and week out. Guys, this is not a vacation. It is imperative that we maintain a schedule. Keep your daily regiments in place as much as possible to avoid a lag in professional or mental productivity. Get up early. Set a chore schedule. If you work from home, schedule a lunch break, and an end of the work day. If you had coffee in the morning before work, have coffee in the morning before work. Keep to a schedule in order to get the most out of this quarantine.
Go Easy on Yourself. This is hard.
To date, five people that I know have passed away from this virus, another few are in bad shape, and still others are recovering. The nature of this virus and the quarantine is such that the losses haven’t hit home the way they normally would. You read about them on social media, but you can’t go to the hospital to visit or even pay your respects because of the lockdown. The news and the information and the detachment from it all can be overwhelming. We are losing people that we love, while trying to survive this thing by any means. Go easy on yourself. You are dealing with a lot. Take time to cry. Take time to mourn. But also, don’t overwhelm yourself with the enormity of it all. Unplug periodically in order to recharge your spirit. No one is asking you to carry this all on your own. You don’t have to answer every social media post. You don’t have to read every article. Your mental health is of the utmost importance right now. Take care of yourself.
Keep your Mind and Body Active!
When you’re working from home, it’s very easy to spend all day laying on your couch using your laptop, only to put the laptop down after work hours and grab the remote. Now, you’re spending all night laying on our couch watching Netflix. Think, for a moment, about what a normal Thursday would look for you. Waking up early, walking eight blocks to the train, down the stairs and into the station. Jostling with others to get a seat or a safe space on the train. Jostling to get off. Walking up the stairs. Walking four blocks to work. Walking, kneeling, standing and moving for eight hours a day. When you look at a normal day, what you might find is that you’re pretty active. Don’t lose that activity because you’re home! The quickest way to put pounds on is to lay around all day eating and watching television. Remember my first strategy point – THIS IS NOT A VACATION! Maintain physical activity throughout the day. Take a social distancing walk. Do pushups every hour. Choose to be active with intent, because all day on the couch is an unhealthy day. The same goes for your mind. Engage your mind daily. Read that book you’ve been meaning to get to. Start that passion project. An active mind, and an active body is a healthy person. And being healthy will help us all fight this virus.
Love on One Another
Lastly, make it your business to give love to the person or to the people you are quarantined with. I don’t care who you’re sheltered in with, it isn’t easy being around anyone all day and night for weeks. Be considerate. Give one another alone time. Be patient, especially with the children. Take this time to find new ways to connect. Understand that people deal with situations like this in different ways. Your spouse or partner may be experiencing this in a different way than you are. And, that’s okay. Be supportive, be non-judgemental, be a place of safety and protection and not a place of denial or complaint. It looks like this PAUSE isn’t going to be lifted soon. We are going to need each other more every day. So, continue to find ways to love one another.
I hope these strategies help. As I mentioned above, please email us at editors@ourtimeathome.com to comment about some of the ways you’ve been finding peace in this time of chaos. Be safe.
What’s Going On
CORONAVIRUS/2020
Referencing the Coronavirus menace, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO (World Health Organization) Director General, says. “We Are All In This Together.” The pandemic virus has been disruptive to our national health system and to the economy. The American response to this pernicious infection should be an immediate White House declaration of war on a scale akin to the New Deal, Marshall Plan, and the Great Society combined. It was not! Read the 3/30 Time Magazine cover story, “WHEN THE WORLD STOPS: What to Know and Do About the Global Pandemic,” a compendium of essays about coronavirus. My favorite is Viewpoint, “Disease In A World Without A Leader” by Yuval Noah Harari. On March 30, global Coronavirus stats reveal 782, 365 cases with 164,566 recoveries and 37,582 deaths. The US coronavirus figures reveal 164,700 cases and 3170 deaths since its Jan/2020 arrival in the state of Washington. NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo reported 75,795 cases and 1550 deaths.
NEW YORK: New York is the epicenter of coronavirus, in the United States. The 3/30 NYC stats are 38,087 cases and 914 deaths. Break-down by borough: Queens is hardest hit with 12,756, Brooklyn 10,171, Bronx, 6,925, Manhattan 6,060 and Staten Island 2,140. This will [put] focus on some of the little-known aspects of coronavirus culture in the US and beyond. NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, assessing the magnitude of the pandemic and its effect on New Yorkers and the nation, launched his plan to do something about it.
Cuomo needed White House approval for the requisition of services necessary for New York to weather the aborning public-health crisis. He needed FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the US military and a waiver for NYS to access tests for the virus from local labs and massive inventories of ventilators. Whatever Andrew wants, Andrew gets, sorta/kinda. NY got what the Governor wanted and quickly became the state with the lion’s share of virus cases. The NYS high rate of virus infection is in relation to its aggressive testing practice, which has administered more tests than any other American city or state or any other nation, including China, where the virus originated.
Governor got most of his wish-list items. New York got a USNS (United States Naval Ship) outfitted with 1000 beds to address the hospital capacity shortage that was wisely foreseen. NY hospitals are creating pop-up extensions to accommodate the surge in coronavirus cases. The CDC green light to use NY labs for testing was the major breakthrough. Governor has appropriated dorm rooms for hospital capacity. Some ventilators were provided, but not enough. Therein lies the existing hospital crisis. The Ford Motor Company and GE have agreed to retrofit their factories to start producing ventilators, which are, or will be, needed in states across the country.
Cuomo is the combatant for which the coronavirus has been looking. His daily TV updates on the NY coronavirus intensive are like dispatches from a war zone. The updates are an anatomy of the virus, complete with charts and math model projections, which inform, while also placating the fears that attend the crisis. Friends from California, Florida, Georgia and Texas comment on the Cuomo leadership model, something they say their local politicos fail to provide. If they are not getting it from the White House, why not NY’s Gov? His many NY detractors have been generous with compliments about his outstanding management of the COVID-19 crisis. Media junkies must read Maureen Dowd’s 3/27 NY Times opinion piece, “Let’s Kick Coronovirus’s Ass: In this nightmarish moment, we’re feeling warm and fuzzy about the cold and calculating Andrew Cuomo.” It is classic Dowd nice/nasty.
With lockdown orders in effect throughout most enlightened American states, the time is now to complete the 2020 Census form, which has been collecting dust on home/office desks. Don’t know about you, but the Manhattanville US Post Office on West 125 Street in Central Harlem has been MIA with mail delivery since October 2019. While in lockdown, research the myriad, free tax-return services, since the April 15 US tax deadline has been pushed back to July 15.
The Democratic Convention to nominate its 2020 presidential nominee will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 13 to 16. Former Obama VP Joe Biden is presumed nominee, barring some other glitch in the scheme of things. He promised to have a woman running mate. Will she be Kamala Harris, Amy Klobachar, Stacey Abrams, or Elizabeth Warren? Biden is being obscured in media during the daily COVID-19 updates where Trump appears spewing forth untruths about the virus and its possible treatment. Most thought that Trump began to listen to his Task Force scientists and medics when he reversed his position to open America for business on Easter and decided to extend a lockdown and quarantine period through April 30. According to some pundits, the epiphany was in response to his national southbound polling figures since his Easter/back to business utterance.
ART/CULTURE
Man does not live by health and economic crises alone. The higher part of our right brain/left brain selves would die without art and culture, which makes the human spirit soar to imaginable heights or plunge to new depths. Check out the 3/19 NY Times essay, “The African American Art Shaping the 21st Century, with commentary by 35 Black denizens from the world literature, film, music, theater, performance art, on Black artists who have influenced them. Some creators who comment are Ta-Nehisi Coates on Kendrick Lamar; Kerry Washington on Beyonce/Lemonade; Oprah on Toni Morrison; Issa Rae on SCANDAL; Kerry James Marshall on GET OUT; Desus Nice on Black Social Media; Kenya Barris on Glenn Ligon; and Billy Porter on POSE. Essay is informative and eminently readable in about 15 minutes. Crises give birth to creative expression.
The ABC/ESPN 10-part documentary on basketball legend/billionaire Michael Jordan, originally scheduled for a June ESPN telecast, has been rescheduled to start on April 19. Social media prevailed on TV network bosses to change the air date because its followers, bored with cabin fever, crave sports news programming. Other Jordan documentary partners include Netflix, Jordan, the NBA and Mandalay Sports Media.
Next week signals the onset of rituals for two Abrahamic-centric religions, Judaism and Christianity. Palm Sunday on April 5 begins the final week of the Lenten season, which ends on Easter Sunday on April 12. The most important day in the Christian calendar, Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus on the third day after his crucifixion, which always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. Happy Easter! Passover, (Pasach in Hebrew), begins at sundown on April 8 and continues through April 16. It commemorates the liberation of Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. HAPPY PASSOVER!
Black Communities Nationwide Hit Hard by COVID-19
Wisconsin’s Gov. Tony Evers set many heads nodding across the nation when he spoke of the plight of people in Milwaukee.
“The severity of this disease in the African American community is a crisis within a crisis,” said Gov. Evers.
He voiced what many have been thinking, seeing, and living: that the eye of the storm of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is wherever Black people are found in tight concentration and financial hardship. The virus – called “Big Rona” in creative and colorful Black vernacular – has been devastating to countless populations worldwide. In the U.S. it’s the poor and working poor, the incarcerated, the educationally disenfranchised and immigrant communities that are suffering the greatest losses. And Black people in these United States comprise the majority in four out of these five categories.
Here in Brooklyn we are familiar with the ways in which these dynamics play out. And we know that just as we were strongly encouraged at every turn to fill out the 2020 Census, being counted as people affected by the coronavirus is also critically important. It matters now and matters heading into the future that is life beyond COVID-19.
In Milwaukee, where Black people are 38% of the population, they represent half the confirmed cases of COVID-19 and half of the deaths. Residents say that in some areas of the city, grocery stores, healthcare options and even public transportation are not easily accessible.
Also concerned about this is Commissioner of Health for the City of Milwaukee, Jeanette Kowalik.
“African Americans in Milwaukee face other socioeconomic challenges that can impact a person’s health,” said Kowalik. “We must remember now and in the future that public health goes beyond just diagnosis and treatment and should be considered more holistically.”
Maryland State Delegate Nick Mosby, in a series of social media posts, insisted that the federal government release data on the number of coronavirus cases broken down by race. “… I have asked multiple sources about the demographic breakdown by race of known COVID-19 cases and deaths.” Mosby posted on Twitter. “I have seen county, age, and sex, but not race.”
Mosby is concerned about cities such as Baltimore, which is 60% Black and is where community residents are painfully acquainted with the city’s infamous medical experimentation and profiteering using the body of Henrietta Lacks. He also expressed that implicit bias in the healthcare delivery system may compound the difficulties that communities of color face in accessing testing and treatment.
“Because of the stress that this pandemic will place on hospital capacity,” he told The Baltimore Sun, “this will have an adverse impact on populations who are less likely to have insurance and primary-care physicians.”
In Detroit, medical anthropologist Jonathan Stillo of Wayne State University concurs that racial demographic info might help lessen this impact.
“Right now, we’re only seeing little snapshots, and those are totally dependent on how much testing is happening,” he told Michigan Radio, the local NPR station. “It makes the job of researchers, and folks who are trying to figure out what’s going on and make policy to address it, really hard. We’re flying blind, I think, in a lot of ways.”
What is known does not inspire confidence that Detroit can efficiently meet the needs of the Black community without access to the data being requested.
“African American folks in Detroit have higher rates of asthma, they have higher rates of diabetes, they have higher rates of some of these conditions that we think may make outcomes worse,” Stillo said. “You’re sort of layering biological problems on top of already-existing social problems. Issues of lack of health care, lack of insurance, unstable housing, and things like that.”
APOCALYPSE HERE:
Life’s Changed in Brooklyn and Everywhere Else …
In New York City these days, there are no bustling crowds, no standing-room-only on the subway. Plenty of seats because most everyone is doing the right thing, staying home. Waiting on a line spacing 6 ft apart to enter the supermarket. Everyone wearing masks moving through the aisles. I never thought to see this in the United States. This could only happen someplace else. Never here.
As the death toll mounts, now projected to be 2,000 a day across the country, the reality is seeking in… However, we can control our space, by staying away from people and by actively protecting ourselves, and those few we have around us.
This always happened someplace else. Never here. It was a sudden pang of heartbreak. As the death toll mounts, now projected to be 2,000/day across the country, the reality keeps sinking in.
However, we can control the virus, by staying away from people and by actively protecting ourselves, and those few we have around us.
As we said in the March 5, issue on “Coronavirus and Hand Awareness” wash your hands throughout the day and “be aware of everything touched and gently assume everyone’s a carrier.” Always carry sanitizer with you and use it after every time your hands touch anything.
Remember your wallet, pants pocket and purse are transfer points for money, credit cards and home to whatever virus they may have picked up being handled or touched on a machine. Again, carry hand sanitizer.
Do not touch your face! It is the areas around the eyes nose and mouth that provide entry for the virus. Do these things and the odds swing in your favor and in the favor of everyone else.
The Good News
There are groups forming and local businesses showing the community’s support and love for the healthcare professionals who are literally putting their lives and the lives and well-being of their families at risk, to help the sick and to save us all in a time of pandemic.
The Soul Food Kitchen at Kingston and Dean has been sending hundreds of no-holds-barred lunches to Interfaith Medical Center and Rick’s Lobster House on Flatbush Avenue near Kings Plaza has also been sending boxed lunches.
Groups of neighbors have come together to support the community and the healthcare workers. Bedstuystrong.com is one and Brooklyn For Life is another. The Go Fund Me page for Brooklyn for Life has raised over $54,000 and is providing 600 meals/day for Brooklyn Hospital staff. And Bedstuystrong.com is a group of neighbors who take lists and bring food they pay for themselves.
In addition to the expressions of love and admiration the community is giving, our health care workers, taking casualties on the frontlines of a war, should have their paychecks matched by the federal government and file as serving in a combat zone for tax purposes.
And the folks in our part of Clinton Hill have been obeying the social distance mandate. I saw it being enforced on St. James Pl. between Gates and Fulton. Two people sitting down and two stopping to talk, and a police loudspeaker blared words to the effect of break it up. You know it’s bad when white people talking on a block with multi-million-dollar homes are being told to move along and the corner stoop where a group of young men are usually found is suddenly empty.
At his Tuesday briefing, Dr. Fauci said the models of the expected disease progress are based on the data they have today. And according to their data project, New York will be having an explosive number of deaths in the next two weeks and there could be as many as 2,000 dying a day across the country. Most of those deaths will be related to underlying symptoms of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and already stressed immune systems.
This is going to hit the African American community hard. Taking too soon a generation with knowledge still to be given and love to be shared. In this time, there will be no visiting of elders except to leave food and necessities outside the door. And they must be instructed to wipe down and sanitize whatever comes into the house. It is as though we on the outside are the leper colony and they have to keep away.
The ramifications of COVID-19 are moving through society in a cascade of waves, each compounding the one that came before. All of the very basics of survival are being challenged. Health, finances, housing, with an ending yet to be determined. What we do know absolutely for sure, is that the poor and those in ill health will suffer most.
Wash your hands, don’t touch your face and stay away from people, and we’ll get through this together.