Interfaith says its clinics aren’t going anywhere
De Blasio silent as cash-strapped facility makes
application for fed money to stay open
In a game of hospital poker, the Interfaith Medical Center’s Board of Trustees Tuesday voted Tuesday to unanimously hold onto their money-making outpatient clinics, but it remains to be seen if the state health department will blink.
At stake is the survival of Interfaith, which is currently on life support in its role as the only full-service medical facility serving Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights.
Interfaith was scheduled to close January 26 per a bankruptcy judge’s court order and transfer its outpatient clinics including the as HIV treatment center on Bergen Street, the Bishop O.G. Walker Jr. Health Care Center, a dental clinic and an urgent care center to Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in East Flatbush. However, a $3.1 million infusion of state money just before Christmas bought the hospital until March to come up with a new plan to make Interfaith solvent.
“In light of the expectation that our hospital will continue to operate to March 7, instead of the previously contemplated closing in late January, we have decided to delay the transition of clinics to Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center,” said Albert C. Wiltshire, Chairman of the Board of Interfaith Medical Center said.
Wiltshire said the board determined that such a transition would not make sense prior to the closure of Interfaith because they are a vital component of the medical center’s continuum of quality health care to the traditionally-underserved people of Central Brooklyn.
“In addition because our clinics are key feeders of patient referrals to the hospital, IMC‘s Board believes the fate of the clinics is intertwined with the fate of the hospital and should not be addressed independently,” he added.
Interfaith Board member Diane Porter said delaying the handover of clinics will give Interfaith enough time to submit a new financial reorganization plan this month to become eligible for a federal Medicaid waiver. The federal government has already allocated $10-$15 billion to New York State for this purpose, she said.
“One of our goals is for Interfaith to stay open long enough to take advantage of this money and help us reorganize and become more effective,” said Porter, noting that 80 percent of Interfaith’s patients are on Medicaid – the second highest rate in the state.
Several trustee sources said the Cuomo Administration is “mad as hell” that Interfaith isn’t handing the clinics over to Kingsbrook, and went as far as to issue veiled threats to go to court and possibly hold up the $3.5 million it promised to the facility.
But a State Health Department spokesperson disputed this in an email.
“To ensure the health and safety needs of patients and residents of the community are met, the State has provided $3.5 million to Interfaith Medical Center,” said the spokesperson. “The State will continue to work closely with the facility and other stakeholders towards establishing a quality, accessible and sustainable health care delivery system to serve patients and community residents.
Both the de Blasio Administration and Kingsbrook officials did not respond to inquiries at press time.
Amiri Baraka: Black Leader And Poet Laureate To The ancestors
BY Gloria Dulan-Wilson
One of the greatest icons of the Black Power and Black Arts Movement has made his transition to the ancestors – Brother Amiri Baraka – who was born Everett Leroy Jones and later changed his name to LeRoi Jones, made his transition on January 9, 2014.
Born October 7, 1934 in Newark, NJ, he would have been 80 this year had the Infinite not decided that it was time for him to come Home. By most accounts, he was a prodigy, having graduated from high school at the age of 16. He entered Rutgers, and finding it not to his liking or mind-set, and later transferred to Howard University. Ironically, though, Howard, considered a leading Black college, was even less to his liking because of the bourgeois mind-set of the students of the day. As a result, he dropped out and entered the services. A choice which also proved disastrous because he was dishonorably discharged for reading Communist literature while on the base.
Whether he knew it or not, all these incidences led up to his becoming the militant leader and the progenitor of the Black Arts Movement for which he is so widely known, loved and appreciated. All these involvements, the Beatnik era with Ginsberg in Greenwich Village where you dropped out, tuned out and became anticultural, pointed more to what was absent in his life – and it led to his discovering that he was the answer he was looking for; and by extension, the answer that the rest of us were looking for as well – our BLACKNESS.
For all intents and purposes, LeRoi Jones started out to be a poet and playwright, having started as a Beatnik in the 50’s with some of the luminaries of that era. He originally aspired to be heralded by such literary tomes as the New Yorker Magazine, but according to sources, realized that he could or would never write in their nomenclature because it did not adequately express what he felt as a Black man in America – of course, at that time we were still “Negroes” – nevertheless, the Blackness that was the essential Baraka was slowly rising to the surface.
Even his involvement in the “Beat Generation Movement” was more because of the paucity of authenticity in what was then marginalized Black society. He was trying to find a culture in a subculture whites had carved out for themselves in rebellion to mainstream 50’s and early 60’s.
The major turning point for Baraka was the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, which apparently had a profound affect on him, though at the time he was married to a Jewish woman, had two children and they were co-editors of a magazine. The catalyst of Malcolm’s assassination catapulted him from marginality to full involvement in the Black community.
He moved to Harlem – the Mecca for Black people–divorced his former wife, rolled up his cultural sleeves and began the work that was really already in his heart and genetic code – his calling – the establishment and nurturing of a Black Cultural Artistic and Nationalistic Movement. A movement that evolved into an ethos, a society, a way of life that impacted Black people (we were no longer Negroes by that time either) nationally and internationally.
Of course, the fact that he had penned the play, Dutchman (1964), which garnered many awards, including an Obie (Off-Broadway Award), was yet another clear indication that his Blackness was just waiting for a catalyst to catapult him from the periphery into the very center, the heart of Blackness, where he has remained from that day forward.
Historically speaking, Amiri Baraka – which is the name he adopted in 1967, shedding forever the LeRoi Jones appellation, was co-founder of the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, along with Larry Neal (Lincoln University alumni) and Askia Muhammad Toure. He gave voice and texture to a host of Black artists-in-waiting – including Nikki Giovanni, Gil Scott-Heron, Haki Madhubuti, Gwendolyn Brooks and others – by defining that Black art and writing needed to be relevant to Black people. It could not be just pretty words that rhymed. It could not just be idyllic concepts of sweetness and light. It had to be liberating. It had to evoke action, release the residual slave mentality so many of us were still laboring under during those bad old days (and some of us still are during the contemporary times; and still, even more sadly, some of us have reverted to, finding it too hard to maintain Blackness in the realities of the meanstream mainstream).
An additional historical fact was that Newark, NJ, Amiri’s hometown, exploded into full rebellion (which whites call “riot”) in July 1967 – which, of course any Black person worth his salt knows, never just happens – but is the result of decades of abuse, insults, racist policies and deprivation. Hugh Addonizzio, mayor at that time, was probably as egregious in these policies as any Bull Conner down south – and even more so, given the fact that this was the “North”, the land to which many Blacks had emigrated to get away from just the very same treatments.
Whatever it was, it was the next catalyst that made “LeRoi Jones” a household name for decades to come, because suddenly his face was on the cover of many newspapers with a blood-soaked bandage around his head, flaming eyes and that famous gap in his teeth as he flared at the cameras of the reporters who were there to “cover” the events. It was my first recognition of his as anything other than a poet – when the Philadelphia Inquirer and other local papers had his face front and center with the headlines: “WHAT DOES LEROY JONES WANT??”
It changed the way many other contemporaries viewed him as well – as evidenced by the subsequent Black Power Conferences that were convened and held across the country to try to get a handle on the direction the movement suddenly saw itself going. Amiri made it more than just a movement, and codified the principles by which Black people could inculcate this newfound freedom and way of life in a form of self-liberation from their post-slavery mentalities that they had been laboring under.
SNCC had been likewise instrumental in liberation movements, so there was a strong affiliation with Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and others who had sought to help Black people disassociate themselves from the negative brainwashing of 400 years of enslavement; and Maulana Ron Karenga’s Kawaida Movement, which also saw it as a cultural nationalistic move that could, given the right context, help Black people become self-sufficient in a society bent on keeping them subservient. Under the mentorship of Karenga, Baraka rose to become the central focus in terms of how it should be and could be – and in the case of New Ark – was done.
Efforts to involve the Black Panther Movement proved too risky because of their philosophy of armed confrontation – highly dangerous in a society that thought nothing of blowing Black people away on a regular basis.
Baraka involved time-honored organizations like the Urban League and NAACP as well, rather than ignore their impact and influence on large populations of African-Americans. So Whitney M. Young, Jr. was as critical a factor in the Black Power Conference of 1968 as Max Stanford of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). (NOTE: it’s a Libran trait to try to bring balance to all sides and Baraka – like Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton – all Librans have the capacity to see both sides of a question or problem and want it to the most positive extent possible, amalgamate the positives while eliminating or neutralizing the negatives – it’s what they do.)
When Amiri married the beautiful Amina (formerly Sylvia Robinson) in 1967, he found a soul mate and an equal. She was/is as talented and creative as she was/is beautiful. Theirs was a 46-year marriage, partnership, kinship admired, envied by many of their contemporaries. It was also an example of what happens when Black men and women get it right – mutual love, respect, values, interests, dedication. They had five children* who, each in his or her own right, are offshoots of that considerable talent in their home (Shani, their youngest daughter, was murdered in 2003).
At the 1968 Black Power Conference in Philadelphia, PA, he, along with the team of Carmichael, Brown, Karenga, Jesse Jackson, Milton Henry and others, formulated a protocol that would make it possible for African-Americans across the spectrum of economic and educational status to come together under a consolidated cultural national ethos. In 1967-68, he moved back to New Ark to set up his own center and begin the task of training his community – where he felt he was needed the most – in the rebuilding and development of their own Black-owned, Black-run and Black-educated society.
Interestingly enough, as far as I’m concerned, Amiri Baraka could and should have been the mayor of Newark, NJ – he certainly was the head of New Ark, the society within the city. I’m almost sure, with the influence he exercised over the city at that time, through the 21st century, that if he had at any time expressed the slightest interest in becoming mayor, he would have won with a landslide of votes.
As it was, he so transformed the city during his initial impact that CFUN (Committee for a Unified New Ark) became the national and international model for Black self-empowerment. Under the mentorhsip of Maulana Karenga, Stokely Carmichael and in conjunction with his wife/life mate/partner, Amina Baraka, organized transformation throughout the communities saw the rise of the Spirit House Movers and Players; weekly programs called Soul Sessions – which included originally composed music, interspersed with speeches and lessons on Black history; cooperative educational and child care programs coordinated by Amina Baraka, making it possible for the other women to attend classes, have full- or part-time jobs without exposing their children to the hostile brainwashing of the meanstream educational programs; cooperative housekeeping, cooking and shopping among the women – also coordinated by the women.
Via New Ark, the Barakas had established an example of coordinated, cooperative equality between men and women that had been lacking in most other Black political organizations which either marginalized women or left them out altogether. Subliminally, Amiri may have absorbed much of what he learned from his mother, a social worker, who worked in the community and was well aware of the difficulties many of the families faced in terms of employment, living conditions, educational challenges. Among the many systems established under CFUN were the National Black Leadership Council, Congress of African People, National Black Assembly, African Liberation Support Committee, Black Women’s United Front.
However, by 1974, Baraka had declared the Black Liberation Movement DOA – as the advent of drugs and Blaxploitation movies began to permeate the communities, effectively undermining and supplanting all that had been accomplished – eroding at the effect of Black education in schools, which had become passe’ (now that we were acceptable, we were no longer fashionable). His Marxist period did not mean that he no longer had an interest in Black Nationalism, but that he no longer found the so-called practitioners of cultural nationalism to be as genuine or dedicated as the original founders. Many had become little more than poverty pimps, pretending to be part of a movement to garner whatever funding available – little of which found its way into the Black community or Black institutions.
In the captions of the meanstream press when speaking of Amiri Baraka’s passing, he’s been called “polarizing,” “embattled,” “controversial;” as opposed to “GENIUS”, or “ICONIC”. For us, he was right up there with other Black writers who have made a difference – Frederick Douglass, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Leopold Sedar Senghor and others.
Baraka took no middle path. His phrasing was to be felt as much as read. He was evocative and clarifying at the same time. He made his words leap off the page by the very way in which he placed them. Never meant to be just read as a rhyme – art and poetry were for him a weapon in the battle for the mind, hearts and souls of Black people. He may have made mid-course corrections in his trajectory towards Black Empowerment, but he never stopped being Black – not even for one second of his life.
This could become a very long article if I attempt to write all that Amiri Baraka has done for Black people over the past 50+ years. But now that I’ve laid the groundwork for the context of the contemporary Baraka, it’s important to note that while the meanstream press tried to write him off after he became and was fired as Poet Laureate of New Jersey, so named by former Mayor McGreevey, it shined a light on the fact that he had been busy as ever as professor of African-American Studies at Stony Brook University in Long Island, NY; professor at Rutgers University (which refused to grant him tenure – yet another racist move which let’s you know that it was still alive and well and existing in New Jersey); had authored more books and poems than the white realm could either fathom or keep pace with. A partial list of publications include the following: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note; Blues People: Negro Music in White America; The Dead Lecturer; Dutchman and The Slave; The System of Dante’s Hell; Black Music; Black Magic; In Our Terribleness; It’s Nation Time; Spirit Reach; The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader; Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones; Wise, Why’s Y’s; Funk Lore: New Poems
Of course, his relevance to us had never waned. To have Amiri Baraka as a keynote speaker, a panelist or even an attendee was to us a major coup. It meant what you were doing (or trying to do) had merit and worth. So when he was accorded the title of Poet Laureate, we basically felt it was about time he garnered the recognition in the mainstream he already had with us. He was already always legitimately a Poet Laureate as far as we were concerned. Nine/Eleven notwithstanding, the relevance of the poem that caused all the fracas was true with or without the destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on America, the toppling of the Twin Towers. The pseudo accusation of “anti-Semitism” to most of us was a coverup for the glaring and still unanswered questions that were brought to the forefront in that poem.
It is also why, for the celebration of his 75th Birthday, the City of Newark saw fit to have a five-day celebration instead of a single event. He had more than earned and deserved their/our gratitude and respect for not only staying the course, walking the walk and talking the talk, but showing us the true dimension of who we can be if we’re not afraid to be who we really are. While there are modern efforts on the part of many groups to return to Blackness and empowerment, all that is really necessary is to revisit what has already been set out by Amiri and Amina Baraka and re-inculcate those principles and institutions into modern times. It’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. What’s really needed is to not drop the ball this time and carry it forward to the intended goal.
The magnitude of his contribution to Black people is the gift that keeps on giving for generations to come. It was not now, nor ever intended to be a one-shot deal. He is at one and the same time history and future – prophet and soothsayer and visionary and architect rolled into one.
While his leaving may have been called a “Loss.” It’s more like a legacy that we are yet again charged with the responsibility of carrying forward. And he definitely left several blueprints, so no one can say they don’t know where to start or how to proceed. Amiri Baraka stood only 5’7”, but he left such huge footprints to step in. We just need to read the many instruction manuals he’s penned down through the ages, we’ll have more than enough training and information to go forward to empowerment.
Love, honor, respect and condolences to the Baraka family and to Black people everywhere.
© GDWENTERPRISES
January 14, 2014
Never Forget Part 3: Slave Labor Supports U.S. Economy
By 1856, there were 3,580,023 slaves, according to an average of the 1850 and 1860 census counts. Bear in mind that in 1813, Congress laid a direct tax on property, including “houses, lands and slaves”. This meant that there was now an economic motivation to under-count this part of the owner’s property – the fewer slaves reported, the less taxes paid; slaves were easier to hide than houses or lands.
By 1856, the advertised prices for African-Americans on one document ranged from a high of $2,700 for Anderson, a “No.1 bricklayer and mason”, and $1,900 for George, a “No.1 blacksmith”, to $750 for Rueben, even though he was labeled “unsound”. (See Railroad Contractor’s Credit Sale document of a choice gang of 41 slaves.) The average cost for this lot of people, including “mechanics and laborers”, was $1,488. As a second reference for this number, we can look at the chart for the cost of Prime Field Hands, and find that it is pretty accurate. By multiplying the census count of slaves by the average advertised price, we arrive at a value of $5.3 billion ($5,327,079,968). This may not look like a lot of money now, but compare it to other figures of the day. The National Wealth Estimate for the entire nation in 1856 was only $12.3 billion ($12,396,000,000). [Note: All figures come from tables in the cited U.S. Bureau of the Census publication.] Total Bank Savings Deposits in 1856 was $95.6 million. “Manhattan Island, Land and Buildings” was worth only $900 million dollars, less than one-fifth of the value invested in African-Americans. The 1855 total capital and property investment in railroads was only $763.6 million dollars. Why the $5 billion dollar investment in slaves? In 1859, the total private production income was $4 billion dollars. Of this total, labor-intensive industries like “agriculture” and “transportation and communication” accounted for $1.9 billion dollars, almost one-half of all total private income. This explains why “a good field hand and laborer” would run you $1,550 for Big Fred, aged 24, and $1,900 for George, a “No. 1 blacksmith”. Men like these gave a good return on the dollar.
The money earned from this investment found its way into a variety of banking institutions, which increased from 506 in 1834 to 1,643 in 1865. Many of the names remain familiar to this day: The Bank of New York Company, Inc. – founded 1784, Fleet National Bank – 1791, Chase Manhattan Corporation – 1799, Citicorp/Citibank NA-1812, The Dime Savings Bank – 1859. As banks in King Cottons’ “Chief American market, that of New York”, it is inconceivable that these institutions, and through them the nation, did not benefit from the profits made’ on a slaves’ wages. Their business then, as it is now, was to be a source of funds to build empires in a variety of industries, across the continent, to make land purchases, upgrade equipment, save to send children to college, etc. Railroads could be built using a combination of slave labor and loans taken at banks that held money on deposits from the cotton/slave industry.
Money was also paid to a variety of people who, while not slave owners themselves, were “in the loop” of payments for goods and services. Thus, there were assets being used to develop the country for the benefit of Europeans and their heirs.
Slavery is often looked at as a blot upon humanity rather than the business decision it was. Africans have been presented as lazy, shiftless, good for nothing, when the exact opposite was true. We were a vital necessity to this nation. Africans were the most valuable resource, our value on the open market dwarfed all other industries and values except for the land itself. Historians talk about the Industrial Revolution starting in 18th century England, and the computer Information Age of today. Left out is the Slave Age, that period of the dark days of the golden age of white supremacy. This was when the United States, an emerging nation at the time, used slavery as a tool of a white supremacist/capitalist culture to deal most efficiently with a formidable problem: the supply and cost of manual labor.
At $865 billion a year, information technology represents about 12% of the 1997 Gross Domestic Product ($7,214 billion).
In 1805, slave labor represented as much as 20% of the national wealth. By the 1850’s- ‘60’s, that figure rose to as high as 40%. If a 12% industry such as information technology can affect the entire nation, how much impact does a 20-40% industry have? Let’s take a look at the 1850’s and the effect of slave labor on the economy.
In his work, History of American Business & Industry, Alex Groner observes, “In the sense that they were large and complex producing units, the big plantations were the South’s factories. The hundreds of slaves included large numbers of production workers -the field hands- as well as such specialists and skilled artisans as carpenters, drovers, watchmen, coopers, tailors, millers, butchers, shipwrights, engineers, dentists and nurses …
“Because virtually entire families could be put to work in the fields for most of the year, the slave economy proved ideal for cotton culture. . . .It was not, only the plantations of the South but also the factories, shipping merchants and banks of the North whose economies. became tied more and more closely to cotton. What North and South had in common was the prosperity resulting from the growth of cotton production. The size of the crop climbed steadily from 80 million pounds in 1815 to 460 million, or more than half the world’s output by 1834, and to more than a billion pounds by l850…From 1830 until the Civil War, cotton provided approximately half of the’ nation’s total exports.”
At an average of 400 man-hours per 400-pound ginned bale of cotton (based on census averages), these billion pounds required a billion hours .of unpaid man-hours. . These were supplied by African-American men, women and children, working as slave labor, under threat of torture and death.
Thus produced, the cotton crop traded hands on exchanges like the largest one in New York. Banks and other businesses participated in cotton transactions that were all handled for fees. And so the brokers, traders, lenders, etc. all profited first. Then came the employees of the firms, the landlords, the ‘washerwomen, the street vendors, messengers, haberdashers, milliners and all of their families, mortgage holders and service providers in an ever-widening circle.
Now traded, the cotton found its way to 25 of the 35 states and territories for manufacturing. We don’t have to assume how the product was distributed, we can look at the 1850 list of cotton manufacturers. (See U.S. Census Table CXCVL) Here, we see there were 1,064 businesses directly employing over 92,000 people across the country. Leading the way is Massachusetts, using 223,607 bales of cotton while employing over 29,000 people. It is also interesting to note that the export of slave crops like cotton, tobacco and rice totaled over 60% of all the nations’ exports. This meant that the shipping industry, the dockworkers and the factories on both sides of the Atlantic all made a living from the peculiar institution of African-Americans working as slaves.
It was possible for people throughout Europe to work in cotton factories or peripheral industries in their home countries, save their money and book passage to America. Here, the newly arrived immigrant could get off the boat and work selling apples on Wall Street to the employees of the Cotton Exchange. A seamstress from English mills could come and find work making dresses for the wives and mending the coats of the men who worked in the financial district. Maybe you’ve heard stories like these before. When an industry produces over 60% of the national exports, it reaches farther than can be seen from the docks or from the fields. And there were other crops as well.
There were 2,681 sugar plantations and 8,327 hemp planters. In 1850, there were over 20 million bushels of sweet potatoes, 3 million bushels of Irish potatoes, 7 million bushels of peas and beans, and 8 million pounds of wool, all produced in slave-holding states. The African-Americans that Europeans called “ne’er-do-well”, helped clothe and feed this nation when it needed it most.
Government Profits Most
The government profited most of all. The export of slave-produced crops allowed this emerging nation to import from more industrialized countries. Also, slave-intensive industries such as agriculture, manufacturing and transportation comprised over 60% of the total private production income at the time. In one way or another, this money was taxed. The slaves themselves were taxable as property beginning in 1815. The federal government profited by first placing a tax on the slave as a unit of property, and again when taxes were paid on the land the slaves improved. Taxing authorities, whether federal or local, made their money at some point in the trading of cotton and again when salaries found their way into taxable areas. The government uses a myriad of ways to raise the money it needs to do what it has to do – to build the infrastructure of the nation. To build the roads, forts and pay the federal marshals. This was done, in large part, with slave dollars flowing like an irrigating stream, watering national, state and local governments at various stops along the way.
And now today, the United States stands as a money pump with $7 trillion worth of pressure, creating jobs and millionaires and billionaires with fortunes that span the globe. But it is a pump that was primed with the blood of African and indigenous people.
By David Mark Greaves
Outdoor Afro: A Nation of Environmentalists
Florida-based Founders of Earthwise Productions, Inc., pioneers in the green and conservation movement since 1995, experts on America’s publicly owned land systems, and authors of Legacy on the Land and nature guidebooks (www.legacyontheland.com)
Finally, African-Americans are taking their place in the pantheon of conservation. A national group called Outdoor Afro helps lead this development through online media publishing, a popular blog, public speaking and regional adventure groups including New York, North Carolina, Portland (Oregon), Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and the San Francisco Bay Area. Outdoor Afros collectively camp, hike, bike, bird-watch, fish, hunt, garden, ski — and more!
Duluth-based wildlife photographer, filmmaker, author of Black and Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places (www.dudleyedmondson.com)
Outdoor Afro represents a nation of African-Americans who are comfortable in the great outdoors as well as daily nature appreciation from city to suburb and beyond. Their activities disrupt the false perception that black people do not have a relationship with nature. Outdoor Afro works to shift the visual representation of who connects with the outdoors. They are developing a reputation for documenting and celebrating historical African-American nature experience by leveraging social media while providing support for recreational groups. Find this world at www.outdoorafro.com; to read their blog is to tour our country. Here are some of the leading lights you will find:
San Francisco founder of Outdoor Afro social community, entrepreneur,
mother of three (www.outdoorafro.com)
Dudley Edmondson (Midwest) is a wildlife photographer, nature enthusiast and author of Black and Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places;
Brooklyn-based expert on Food, Farming, Wellness & Ecology and founder of Hol-Life Industries, LLC (www.melissadanielle.com)
Frank and Audrey Peterman (Southeast) founded Earthwise Productions, Inc., giving them a national platform to advocate the expansion of federal and private investment in attracting African-Americans to the wild places they’ve spent almost two decades touring together. Their journey is captured in two popular guides to national parks. Legacy on the Land: a black couple discovers our national inheritance and tells why every American should care and Our True Nature: finding a zest for life in the national park system are as beautifully illustrated as they are great reads;
Rue Mapp (Northwest) is the founder of Outdoor Afro and a successful entrepreneur whose game and hobby store start-up, It’s Your Move, remains an important part of the Oakland, CA community. Rue was named a hero in Backpacker Magazine, and honored as a top black achiever and influencer for the Root 100 in 2012;
Jarid Manos (Southwest) is passionate about preserving the Gulf of Mexico’s unique eco-systems and the prairies of Texas. His habitat preservation and rehabilitation work doubles as job training and therapy for the formerly incarcerated and otherwise underprivileged. His autobiography, Ghetto Plainsman, is widely read and celebrated for its honesty;
Akiima Price (Northeast) directs the Environmental Education Capacity program based at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. This five-year $10 million initiative was funded by the federal Environmental Protection Administration(EPA) and has emerged as a national model and online research common for practicing green educators from both community and academic sites all over the country. A typical day on their Facebook page will see job postings, highbrow journalism on ecology as well as pictures from urban and rural field projects posted by educators.
Do you seek adventure, nature or travel? Outdoor Afro is for you. It’s a focused but not exclusive community enjoyed by all age groups and ethnicities from sea to shining sea. Join upcoming meet-ups listed on their Web site. Melissa Danielle of Bed-Stuy, a regional Afro leader, has planned an all-you-need-to-know-about-day-hiking gathering at REI’s Manhattan outdoors lifestyle shop for the evening of Jan. 21. Past events have included everything from apple-picking to kayaking. Feeling hesitant? This community of novices and experts will have you feeling at home outdoors like many neighbors who are veterans.
Preservationist, U.S. southwestern eco-systems and prairies, author/speaker and founder/CEO/President of the Great Plains Restoration Council (www.jaridmanos.com)
Brother Yusuf Abdul-Wasi (originally of Marcy Houses in Bed-Stuy), who’s been a NYS Department of Environmental Conservation(DEC) representative, found his love for nature in Prospect Park and now uses canoeing to reintegrate formerly incarcerated individuals into family and work life. Ajamu Brown, from Bed-Stuy, of NYCHA’s Office of Public-Private Partnerships, has taken birding on in recent years and even sponsored a first-rate lecture and walking tour by celebrated black birder David Lindo. Nature experience offers its endless wonder to us in all four seasons. Consider the trees within Herbert Von King Park. Identifying tree species when they are bare of leaves is a specialty this season and it calls forth among the tutored (picture books on this diversion are widely available). What are the keys to unlocking this knowledge? Bark texture and color, patterns in branching, fruit types (dry and sparse as they may be), shapes in the dried leaves beneath the larger specimens, and height gets you going! Some species to be seen include Cedar, Hardy hibiscus, London plane, Linden, Ginkgo, Pine oak, Redbud, Crabapple, Smoke bush, White pine, Callery pear, Horse chestnut, Swamp white oak, Sweet gum, Norway maple, Crepe myrtle, Pagoda, Dogwood and Magnolia varieties. Isn’t winter alive!
Albany-based, nationally known Environmental Educator and chair of the Environmental Awareness Network for Diversity in Conservation (www.planetexplore.com/brother_yusuf)
Furthermore: Outdoor Afro does for social networking and black naturalist publishing what a popular poetry anthology has done to write African-Americans back into nature literature. Camille T. Dungy’s Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry makes clear forever that black people have adored the e vironment at least as long as we have been writing in English in North America. Lyrical language from every generation since colonialism serves a bounty of delight with and concern for both wild and cultivated creation.
Brooklyn-based Environmental Activist, community organizer, Bed-Stuy Eco-Mapping Founder, Associate of NYCHA’s Public-Private Partnerships, and Audubon Society honoree (www.linkedin.com/pub/ajamu-brown)
Famous names from the Harlem Renaissance to recent times abound alongside largely forgotten and obscure figures from the distant past. Langston Hughes (Earth Song), Nikki Giovanni (For Saundra), Ishmael Reed (Points of View) and Alice Walker (The Flowers) –among others—walk you through countryside and garden. Their twentieth century poetics contrast well with earlier voices like Phillis Wheatley (On Imagination) and many more. Each selection brings your soul a sweet feeling.
Morgan Powell is a horticulturist and landscape designer. He’s also a blogger at Outdoor Afro.