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March against Gentrification, Racism and Police Violence

Akosua Albritton
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March against Gentrification, Racism and Police Violence

The March against Gentrification, Racism and Police Violence on Saturday, September 9, 2017 was a success for the many organizers despite the long journey in central Brooklyn. It was a seven-mile trek starting downtown and finishing in Bushwick. It was a loud and visible display of “a commitment to community cohesion”.

The planning committee included members of the Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network (BAN), Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Black Lives Matter, Equality for Flatbush (E4F), Flower Lovers Against Corruption (FLAC), Movement to Protect the People (MTOPP), New York Communities for Change (NYCC) and The Crystal House Project (CHP). There were over 90 endorsers of the march.

This was a trek through neighborhoods that have been experiencing the scourge of displacing longtime residents of color and replacing them with higher-income Euro-Americans. The organizers and marchers said it plain: The problem is racism. People of color are being priced out from their longtime homes and businesses to make way for Euro-Americans and chain coffee shops, chain restaurants and chain department stores.

The route had six landmarks of which four were designated for scheduled addresses. The landmarks were Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, Bedford Union Armory and Ebbets Field Apartments in Crown Heights South, Herbert Von King Park in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Myrtle Avenue and Broadway intersection, and the plaza in front of the Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenue/Myrtle L subway station.

There was a challenge to obtaining the sound permit for the Barclays Center Brooklyn stop from the 78th Police Precinct. MTOPP’s Alicia Boyd submitted the sound permit application within the prescribed time. The application was first approved and later denied. In fact, the 78th Precinct directed the group to assemble across Flatbush Avenue. An e-mail sent to persons and groups in BAN’s directory that asked people to call the precinct made the difference. The 78th Precinct received an impactful number of inquiry calls and the precinct issued the permit.

Each of the four stops were selected to bring out an issue facing Brooklyn. Barclays Center–as well as the Atlantic Terminal Mall and several high-rise apartment buildings—came into being due to eminent domain. This gives New York City or New York State the right to determine the existing real estate to be blighted and the right to take private property from the owner(s) for public use; e.g., to build a hospital, school, highway or bridge. The private owner is paid the fair market value for it. What makes eminent domain contentious is that there are many instances in which what is constructed does not appear to be a public good. Rather, the projects are profitable real estate developments with some features that support the community. For example, Barclays Center Brooklyn is the venue for many school graduation ceremonies.

Ebbets Field Apartments is located where Ebbets Field Baseball Stadium served as the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The massive, high-rise complex contains 1,317 apartment units. Its construction was completed in 1962. The current owner, Fieldbridge Associates, is on a drive to turn over the renter profile to a higher income. In the past three years, about 1,600 households have been evicted from it.

It was here that MTOPP’s Alicia Boyd; Victoria Davis, sister to Delrawn Small, who was killed unjustly by NYPD Officer Wayne Isaac; Donna Mussman, associated with the Crown Heights Tenants Council; FLAC’s Janine Nichols and candidates for the 35th Council District Ede Fox, Christine Parker and Jabari Brisport talked about the September 12th Primary.

NYCC member Rachael Rivera came to the microphone to support the “Kill the Deal” campaign, which is the remodeling of Bedford Union Armory, and as a show of comradery. Rivera is a resident of East New York and said, “My neighborhood faces the same displacement pressures as Crown Heights”. BAJI’s Albert St.-Jean talked about the immigrant experience in New York City and the negative impact of gentrification in ethnic communities.

Herbert Von King Park is located in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is experiencing extensive turnover in homeownership, renters and skyrocketing housing prices. Long-standing restaurants, clothes shops and businesses are feeling the push-out from retail chains. Von King Park contains an amphitheater where the marchers could sit, refresh themselves and listen to different speakers.

It was here that homeowner Eyvette Simmons discussed her battle with Ozone Development. Simmons explained how she came home one day to find that the front of her row house on Hancock Street had been painted black without her permission. The entity that painted her house was Ozone Development, which she describes as “one of the new developers grabbing up properties”. After contacting NYC agencies about her home and not receiving help, she contacted BAN to learn what could be done to get the black paint off her building.

Ms. Simmons acknowledges BAN for getting Ozone Development to restore the original color of her home. BAN leader Imani Henry put a twist in thanking those involved in the march’s planning. He acknowledged the people who distributed flyers, signed petitions or babysat for someone who went to the planned meetings.

The march to the last stop, the plaza in front of the Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenue/Myrtle L subway station, seemed to be the most arduous. It was also the miles with the most neighborhood residents that reacted so positively to the spectacle of hundreds of people holding banners, painted signs and placards with such messages as “Brooklyn No Se Vende”, “Stop Killing Black Men”, “Who Protected Us from the Police?” and “Whose City? Our City!” People came out of their homes and businesses to cheer the group.

The march grew at each landmark. It seemed as if the main streets were being flooded with more marchers. By the time the march reached the last stop, there was a throng of approximately 400 people. MTOPP’s LaShaun Ellis recorded the march somewhere before the Myrtle Avenue and Broadway intersection. She counted roughly 300 marchers pass by her cell phone. At Myrtle and Broadway, more people flowed into the main body. After walking the many miles, sitting in the plaza to hear more speeches was a deserved pleasure.

Ridgewood Savings Bank Opens Clinton Hill Branch

Editor, Our Time Press
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Ridgewood Savings Bank Opens Clinton Hill Branch

There was a ribbon-cutting for the Ridgewood Savings Bank’s new branch at the corner of Downing Pl. and Fulton Street this past Tuesday. Leonard Stekol, President and Chief Operating Officer, spoke of how in researching possible branch locations they found that Clinton Hill, with its history and workforce, was an ideal place to set down branch roots.

Peter Boger, Chairman and CEO said, “We believe we have the products and services that will be a perfect fit for this area”. So, “stop in and feel free to open an account in as large an amount as you want”.

Maria Vullo, Superintendent of the NYS Department of Financial Services, said that the branch opening is the product of the Banking Development District (BDD) program, which her agency approves, and is designed to encourage banks to open branches in underserved communities.

“I’m a native Brooklynite from Dyker Heights,” said Ms. Vullo, and “Brooklyn represents the diversity of our country, our world and our city. And the local communities of Brooklyn serve as a melting post for communities from around the world”. She noted also that, “Sometimes as communities prosper, there are people left behind and we don’t want that. The role of government is to create a level playing field to ensure that diversity continues in our neighborhoods throughout the state”, and that’s what the BDD program is all about.

Anthonie Marshall, branch manager, thanked Phillip Kellogg of the Fulton Area Business Alliance for introducing the branch to local businesses and said, “I wouldn’t be doing my job if I don’t say that we have some very attractive CD saving products and checking products as well”.

Lori Lewis, head of Strategic Alliances and Marketing for BP Eric Adams, read a proclamation congratulating Ridgewood Savings Bank “for opening a newly designed, technologically advanced, full-services banking branch in Brooklyn”.

Chairman Boger said that the intimately sized bank and “great staff” have been doing well during the two-month “soft-opening” before the official ribbon-cutting.

 

WHAT’S GOING ON

Victoria Horsford
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THE NEWS OF THE WEEK

Last week, North Americans endured three storms, two natural disasters and one political disaster which spanned the USA, St. Thomas, St. Maarten, Puerto Rico, Antigua/Barbuda and St. Thomas. Mexico had an earthquake. The storms’ names were Donald Trump, Harvey and Irma. The week began with US Attorney General Sessions stating that the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program, which will expire in six months, threatening the lives of more than 800,000 young people, whose parents brought them into the US without adequate immigration documentation. What happened to their American Dream. The president is giving Congress six months to pass an immigration law. The DACA announcement was the forerunner of the two storms that would follow, Harvey and Irma, which devastated states from Texas to Florida to South Carolina. Irma, a Category 5 hurricane, battered the Leeward Islands, then traveled up the north Caribbean doing damage en route to Florida’s east and west coasts. Someone opined that Irma was like Hurricane Andrew, a 90s horror on steroids.   Irma’s wind velocity of 185 miles per hour and width have surpassed all records to date.

Actor Robert DeNiro and his partners own property in Barbuda, which was to be upgraded to a luxe hotel, said that he is ready to join the rehab effort. British billionaire Richard Branson, who owns an island in the British Virgin Islands, says that the US, Britain, France and the Netherlands should develop a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean, which is vulnerable (yearly) to hurricanes and their reign of terror. Royal Caribbean Cruise Line dispatched two cruise ships to the Caribbean and to Florida.

There are comparisons between the hurricane destruction in the Caribbean and in the USA. Venues most seriously afflicted in both areas are places with loose building codes and infrastructure, where houses were leveled and will require long rehab efforts related to the absence of energy sources.   Why do post-hurricane First World USA cities like Houston, Tampa, Miami and Key West resemble Third World countries like Barbuda and St. Maarten?   Is the real ogre natural disasters or is it a failure to implement effective environmental policies?   American meteorologists argue that the warm waters in the Gulf and the Caribbean Sea were signs of imminent storms this year. Florida, like most Caribbean nations, is a tourism user-friendly economy.

September is the beginning of the aggressive phase of the hurricane season. Is something worse than Harvey and Irma possible by November?

 BUSINESS AFFAIRS

Carver Federal Savings Bank hosts a free one-day, hands-on workshop called PROFIT MASTERY: Creating Value and Building Wealth, which will focus on “fiscal fitness”, on September 28 and September 29 from 9 am to 5 pm. Workshop venues: Harlem Community Development Corp. at the Harlem State Office Building at 163 West 125th Street on 9/28 or at York College, 94-20 Guy R. Brewer Boulevard, Faculty Dining Room, in Queens on 9/29. Registration deadline is 9/26….. e-mail: carverbank.com/profitmastery.

Robert Smith

The MIPAD and the African Students Association of Columbia University presents “2017 AFRICA WEEK NYC” on September 25-29. Theme is UN International Decade of People of African Ancestry 2015-2024.   The MIPAD (Most Influential People of African Descent under 40) Africa Week calendar is planned around the opening of the 72nd United Nations General Assembly session. Africa Week events include an Africa and Diaspora Roundtable; a tour of the Africa Center, formerly the Museum of African Art; Class of 2017 Awards and Recognition Dinner and forums pertinent to business and entrepreneurship, politics and governance, arts and culture. MIPAD Valedictorians Margaret Anadu, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs, and Mohammed Dewji, CEO, METL Group, will be in attendance. A picture of Robert Smith, African-American IT billionaire, is posted at MIPAD’s website. [Visit MIPAD.org]

COMMUNITY AFFAIRS

 

Velmanette Montgomery

The Bard Prison Initiative, the Redemption Center, the Fortune Society, College & Community Fellowship, Hour Children, Inc., NY Theological Seminary and others will co-convene a conference, “THINKING RE-ENTRY II: An Examination of NYC Services & Needs for the Formerly Incarcerated”, on September 20 from 8 am to 3 pm at the Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Drive at 120th Street, Harlem. NYS Senator Velmanette Montgomery is keynote speaker.   Faith community members, educators, socialists will figure prominently on the myriad panels to discuss the need for more NYC and state support services for the formerly incarcerated.   Workshop sessions on housing, employment and education are part of the conference’s agenda. [RSVP@interchurch-center.org]

MEDIA MATTERS

Read NY Times Magazine cover story, “A Dream Deferred, Dividing Lines”, by Nikole Hannah-Jones about a 1965 lawsuit filed against Jefferson County, Alabama by Linda Stout, a 16-year-old African-American which resulted in a court order that forced local public schools to desegregate. Still under that order, 52 years later, a 13-year-old African-American coed has inherited Stout’s lawsuit and the “persistent legacy of racism in American education”.

Publisher Mort Zuckerman sold the New York Daily News, the city’s premier mainstream tabloid, to TRONC, formerly the Tribune Publishing Company.   TRONC owns some of America’s most prestigious newspapers, including the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun. Arthur Browne, current Daily News editor-in-chief, remains in that berth through year’s end. He has been named Daily News editor.

SEPTEMBER 2017

Bozoma Saint John

The Africa America Institute hosts its 33rd Annual Awards Gala on September 19 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Columbus Circle. Bozomo Saint-John is one of the four AAI Gala honorees, which were referenced in WGO on August 17. Profiled in a NY Times story, “Is This the Woman Who Will Save Uber?”, the Ghana-born Saint-John, a medical school dropout, is “brand” agent extraordinaire who worked for Spike Lee’s ad agency and Pepsi-Cola where she orchestrated the Beyonce Super Bowl halftime spectacular in 2013. The AAI Gala is sure to be a sellout with Saint-John in the mix. Uber, too, will be much better for wear with Bozomo Saint-John aboard. [Visit aaionline.org]

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation hosts its 47th Annual Legislative Conference, which convenes September 20-24 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. The ALC is the “leading policy conference on issues impacting African-Americans and the Global Black Community”.

A Harlem-based entrepreneur, Victoria Horsford is reachable at

Victoria.horsford@gmail.com.

David Mark Greaves
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Local Elections

In a stinging upset for Democratic Party leaders, outsiders Sandra Roper and Ellen Edwards won seats on the Civil Court, ousting party picks David Pepper and longtime judge Frederick C. Arriaga. We could not help but notice that all of the candidates who either advertised or were featured in Our Time Press won. That list includes the five winning judicial candidates and Alicka Ampry-Samuel in Council District 41 as well as easy winner District Attorney Eric Gonzalez. Future candidates and consultants might want to take note.

New mother Laurie Cumbo (CD35) remained the incumbent besting another spirited run from Ede Fox, and two of the most outspoken members of the council, Jumaane Williams (CD45) and Inez Barron (CD42), both coasted smoothly to victories in their races.

Hurricanes and Social Disasters

As predicted by climate scientists, the increased water held in the warmed atmosphere has increased the power of hurricane winds and rain. According to local authorities, Hurricane Irma, as a Category 4 hurricane, left 90% of homes destroyed or damaged in the Florida Keys alone in its wake. Five (5) million people without power, hundreds of thousands without telecommunications, food, water, sewage, gas for cars or generators to run the AC.

Irma as a Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour and wind gusts to 220, decimated the small Caribbean island of Barbuda. Prime Minister Gaston Browne reported that 95 percent of the structures on Barbuda were destroyed saying, “As it stands, Barbuda is practically uninhabitable”.

ABC News reported that on the French territory of the virtually destroyed island of St. Martin, Irma “exposed simmering racial tensions…with some black and mixed-race residents complaining that white tourists were given priority during the evacuation”. “On Monday, France’s Representative Council of Black Associations asked the government for a parliamentary inquiry, citing concerns that those who were evacuated were not “necessarily the most in distress”. “In my eyes, Irma is for the French Antilles what Hurricane Katrina was for Louisiana in the U.S. — an exposer of racial and social inequalities,” the group’s spokesman, Louis-Georges Tin, told the Associated Press.”

Cuba, despite ten dead and the ravages brought to its own shores, was still able to send electrical workers to Antigua and hundreds of medical personnel to its Caribbean neighbors in more dire need.

Slave-Ship Conditions for Texas Prisoners After Harvey

Writing in Truthout, reporter Candice Bernd described an “horrific” situation for the men in cages inside the federal prison complex in Beaumont, Texas following the record-breaking rainfall from Hurricane Harvey. “Multiple prisoners and their relatives detailed how the lack of running water caused some men to defecate in bags and others to drink contaminated toilet water. Many say they have seen men lose consciousness in the units, succumbing to the extreme heat and putrid fumes wafting through the cell blocks from bags of excrement, nonflushable Porta-Potties and backed-up toilets, as well as the stench of the men’s unwashed bodies after having not showered in more than 10 days. According to their messages, they have also been in need of clean laundry.

Prisoners described receiving only two bottles of water a day as temperatures reached close to 100 degrees, and said that prison officials have been turning the water on once a day to flush toilets while warning the men not to drink the visibly contaminated water.”

From Texas to Florida to the Caribbean islands, there is pain, anguish and unknown futures. Those of us safe and sound and in comfort, would do well to remember those who are not and how close we are every day to becoming one of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

View From Here

David Mark Greaves
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View From Here

We thought the worst of climate change would not be felt until sometime in the future. And while that is still true, what is happening now around the world is bad enough and yet is only an omen of what is to come. And while storm waters are raging across the planet from Texas to Nigeria, storms are raging in the hearts of young people, brought into the country illegally by their parents, and now because of the threat of ending the DACA immigration program, fearing deportation to ancestral countries they don’t know.

This is a stressful time in the country with so much incoming and all of it marked urgent. North Korea with the H-bomb and an ICBM to put it on. A delusional president who believes anything he says is true, although others, looking at objective facts see the lies. Climate catastrophes around the world, in places where there are not resources to protect or recover that the U.S. has. All of this goes along with the war in Afghanistan, which has itself receded to background noise, except when someone local is killed.

And while all of this is going on, there is a category five hurricane implicit in the reading and math scores recently released by the State. the percentage of black students who meet reading standards in the city is 28.9% a 2.3% increase over last year. At this rate of increase, it will be decades before scores are at a competitive level. In this really the best the city can do?   According to international tests, the United States itself has traditionally had dozens of countries ahead of it in math, reading and science. Our public schools are ranked among the worst in the state in a country that is ranked among the worst in the world.   How can we expect our young people to compete when the best of those from abroad, want to live in Brooklyn?

The state of education for African-Americans in the city is a catastrophe of the first magnitude as hundreds of thousands of lives and futures are misdirected and lost just as surely by poor education as by a storm surge. And as with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, emergency funds have to be allocated and the same passion and intensity of effort as storm recovery is needed by all of us.

 

 

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