Florida Courier - August 25, 2017

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AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

VOLUME 25 NO. 34

‘I HAVE DONE A BAD THING’ A highly decorated, mentally unstable ex-Marine kills two Central Florida police officers.

COMPILED FROM WIRE REPORTS

ORLANDO – On Aug.18, after investigators say he shot two Kissimmee police officers, Everett Glenn Miller was sitting at a Kissimmee (Orange County) bar.

Miller, 45, had been acting suspiciously and would not leave, a manager at Roscoe’s Bar & Packaging told Osceola County deputy sheriffs. He matched the description of the man who had shot two police officers, according to documents.

‘I’m innocent’ When the officers approached him, Miller reached for his waistband – he was armed with two handguns – but a deputy tackled him to the ground and arrested him.

As six deputies and a Florida Highway Patrol trooper tried

to remove him, Miller cursed at them and insisted he “didn’t do anything,” records show.

“I’m innocent,” he yelled. “I didn’t do it, I’m a veteran.”

But later that night in an interview room at Kissimmee police headquarters, Miller’s demeanor changed.

Wanted to die “Everett began to cry, said he did not want to live and pleaded with me to kill him,” Detective Cpl. Charles Hess wrote in an arrest report. Hess told him that nobody at the station was going to kill him and asked why he would say that.

“I have done a bad thing,” Miller said.

Miller is accused of shooting and killing Officer Matthew Baxter and Sgt. Richard “Sam” Howard during a routine stop, allegedly opening fire on officers who didn’t have a chance to fire back.

Baxter reportedly stopped Miller minutes earlier in a group of three people he deemed “suspicious.” Howard was in the area and decided to help as backup.

See MILLER, Page A2

STEPHEN M. DOWELL / ORLANDO SENTINEL / TNS

Law enforcement officers stand guard outside Osceola Regional Medical Center in Kissimmee after two Kissimmee Police officers were shot on Aug. 18.

2017 TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE

We all looked up

CHRIS LEE/ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH/TNS

This composite image of eight pictures shows the phases of Monday’s total eclipse as the moon passed from left to right in front of the sun near Perryville, Mo.

Florida better prepared on Andrew anniversary FROM THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

With Thursday marking the 25th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew pounding Miami-Dade County, the state’s top emergency-management official said the storm’s legacy has left Florida better prepared to handle hurricanes.

“It’s our readiness for them, both in terms of hardened infrastructure to reduce the actual impact from the storm itself and the ability to prepare for it and respond,” said Bryan Koon, director of the state Division of Emergency Management. “We are going to know the storm is coming sooner that we ever have before.

Our citizens are going to be ready more than they ever have before.”

Worst ever Andrew, which made landfall on Aug. 24, 1992, is the most destructive storm to ever hit the

ALSO INSIDE

state. With sustained winds of 165 mph, Andrew, caused about $25.3 billion in damage in Florida and left 44 people dead.

New challenges since Andrew include more development and residents, many of whom have never been through a storm.

Emergency-management officials say people need to take steps to prepare for storms.

“A lot of folks will say that hurricane season doesn’t really begin until football season starts,” Koon said. “We’re there now.

Take advantage of the fact that there are still blue skies and it is nice out. Get ready for what could be a very active season.”

Earlier this month, Colorado State University researchers projected a 61 percent chance Florida will be hit by a hurricane this year.

Typically, the average is 51 percent. The researchers also upped their projection for the season to 16 named storms, with eight reaching hurricane strength.

Two thus far As of the Florida Courier’s press time Wednesday night, there have been eight named storms in the Atlantic this year.

Two, Franklin and Gert, have developed into hurricanes.

Tropical Storm Emily at the end of July is the only one to directly impact Florida.

SNAPSHOTS NATION | A6

Malia Obama goes to college

Statues and slavery Pols argue about next steps COMPILED FROM WIRE REPORTS

HEALTH | B3

Rate of suicide among teen girls reaches high

FINANCE | B4

It’s harder to get rich than it used to be

TALLAHASSEE – Amid a national debate about monuments and statues, a South Florida lawmaker renewed his push Monday for a likeness of Mary McLeod Bethune – an educator and civilrights activist who founded what is now known as Bethune-Cookman University – to represent Florida in the U.S. Capitol.

State Sen. Perry Thurston, DFort Lauderdale, proposed a resolution (SCR 184) to have Bethune replace Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith as one of Florida’s two representatives in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. The proposal is filed for the 2018 legislative session, which starts in January.

Replacement coming The Legislature voted in 2016 to replace a statue of the St. Augustine-born Smith. That vote came during a nationwide backlash against Confederate symbols in the wake of the 2015

shooting deaths of nine AfricanAmerican worshippers at a historic Black church in Charleston, S.C. Also, critics said Smith had only a tenuous connection to Florida.

After lawmakers decided in 2016 to replace the Smith statue, a panel known as the Great Floridians Committee nominated three potential replacements.

Bethune, who was born in 1875 to formerly enslaved African descendants in South Carolina and who died in 1955, was the only candidate to receive the unanimous support of the Great Floridians Committee.

The other two nominees were Everglades activist and writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Publix grocery story founder George Washington Jenkins Jr.

Continuing debate Thurston’s proposal for the 2018 session emerged Monday amid a fierce debate about removing Confederate statues and monuments. That debate has been fueled, in part, by a White nationalist rally this month in Charlottesville, Va., that turned deadly. A plan to remove a statue See STATUES, Page A2

COMMENTARY: CHARLES W. CHERRY II: RANDOM THOUGHTS OF A FREE BLACK MIND | A4 GUEST COMMENTARY: EBONY SMITH: HAVING EDUCATIONAL OPTIONS HELPED MY DAUGHTERS | A5

FOCUS

A2

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

The apple doesn’t fall too far from the racist tree The Trump apple doesn’t fall too far from the Trump tree of hate!

President Donald Trump has been getting a lot of pushback since he made some outrageous comments following episodes of violence that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The president basically suggested that many people who joined White nationalists, White supremacists and Ku Klux Klansmen in a rally and march allegedly in support of statues erected in honor of Confederate General Robert Lee were “fine people.”

No surprise Well, what did Americans think 45 would say? Trump’s father was a proud and vocal supporter of the Klan that hates Blacks, Jews and a host of other races and eth-

LUCIUS GANTT THE GANTT REPORT

nic groups.

In fact, an article from a June 1927 edition of the New York Times records seven men being arrested after a brawl at a Ku Klux Klan rally in New York, including “Fred Trump of 175-24 Devonshire Road, Jamaica” – the onetime address of the current US president’s father.

Like many hatemongers of today, Donald Trump probably grew up in a house where the ideals and philosophies of White supremacy were discussed on a regular, if not daily, basis.

Trump became the darling of racists when he got heavily involved in the dispute of former President Barack Obama’s legitimacy to serve as the leader of the free world.

‘Birther’ advocate “Birtherism,” as the challenge to Obama’s citizenship and his right to serve as US president came to be called, originated in Illinois with a notorious political gadfly named Andrew Martin, who declared Obama was not the person he claimed to be. Without offering any proof, Martin said Obama was a Muslim who concealed his religion; Trump agreed with him.

The Justice Department sued Donald Trump, his father Fred, and Trump Management for alleged housing discrimination in New York to obtain a settle-

ment where Trump and his father would promise not to discriminate against Black people.

The case eventually was settled two years later after Trump tried to countersue the Justice Department for $100 million for making false statements. Those allegations were dismissed by the court.

Trump also falsely accused a group of young Black men of attacking a White female and called for their execution. The so-called “Central Park Five” were all found not guilty by a court of law.

Trump has also called Muslims “terrorists” and Mexicans “murderers and rapists.”

Doesn’t care And Donald Trump doesn’t even care how his love for neoNazis impacts his daughter and son-in-law who are Jewish, who

remembers the Holocaust, and who practice the religion of Judaism.

Don’t be surprised about Donald Trump’s love for White nationalism, White supremacy and modern-day Nazis. It appears that the 45th president is a closet Klansman, and the closet is in the Oval Office in Washington, D.C.!

The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Donald Trump is the racist version of Johnny Appleseed.

Buy Gantt’s latest book, “Beast Too: Dead Man Writing,” on Amazon.com and from bookstores everywhere. “Like” The Gantt Report page on Facebook. Contact Lucius at www. allworldconsultants.net.

STATUES from A1

of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee helped spur the rally.

A day after the proposal emerged in the Senate, House Democrat Rep. Patrick Henry of Daytona Beach filed an identical measure (HCR 73). In a statement released Tuesday, Henry described Bethune as a “true stateswoman.”

Representing Florida The National Statuary Hall allows each state to be represented by the likenesses of two people.

Along with Smith, Florida has long been represented by John Gorrie, widely considered the father of air conditioning.

During the 2017 session, however, competing proposals and a House chairman’s concerns about the process stymied efforts to approve a new statue.

A proposal backing Bethune passed the Senate but had no counterpart in the House. A separate House effort, pitching a likeness of Douglas, never got a hearing.

Rep. Scott Plakon, a Longwood Republican who chaired the subcommittee that declined to hear the Douglas bill, said in June that he had qualms about simply following the lead of the Great Floridians panel.

Rebel soldier removal Gov. Rick Scott says proposals to remove a Confederate soldier monument from the Capitol grounds should be handled through the Legislature, where the controversial issue could be discussed early next year.

Democratic gubernatorial candidates and the Florida NAACP are among a chorus of people calling for Scott to relocate the

Perry Thurston

Patrick Henry

Rick Scott

Adora Obi Nweze

Andrew Gillum

Chris King

Bill Nelson

Kionne McGhee

memorial outside the Old Capitol or to hold a special legislative session on the future of Confederate monuments on public lands.

Agency decision Scott held to his stance Tuesday that government agencies across the state that have Confederate markers on their property should make the final decisions about possible removal. And in the case of the monument outside the Old Capitol, Florida lawmakers will start holding a series of pre-session committee meetings Sept. 12.

“We’ve got a regular session that starts in January, so that’s just a few months away,” Scott told reporters Tuesday after an Enterprise Florida board meeting in Fort Lauderdale.

As of early Wednesday, no bills had been proposed to address the Confederate soldier memorial that has stood outside the Old Capitol since 1882.

‘Steadfast and immovable’ On Tuesday, the Florida NAACP demanded Scott and lawmakers remove the Confederate monument – as well as flags and memorials representing “hate, racism, and discrimination.”

“We are and will contin-

ue to be steadfast and immovable in the fight against discrimination, prejudice and hatred,” Adora Obi Nweze, president of the Florida State Conference of NAACP Branches, said in a prepared statement.

Candidates weigh in Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, a Democratic candidate for governor, has directly targeted the Confederate soldier memorial as something glorifying history’s “ugliest moments.” The monument lists Civil War battles participated in by Confederate soldiers from Leon County.

Another Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Winter Park businessman Chris King, went further.

“These monuments should be removed because we should not celebrate literal anti-American ideology or any ideology based on the oppression of any group of people,” King said in a statement. “And to those who say these monuments are needed to preserve our history, I say we don’t need memorials celebrating this dark time in our history.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat expected to be challenged

by Scott next year, tweeted Tuesday that “Confederate statues belong in a histor-

MILLER from A1

Family men Baxter, 27, died Friday night shortly after the shooting. He was married to a fellow Kissimmee Police officer and had four children. Howard, 36, had one child and died Saturday afternoon, Aug. 19.

Miller is being held without bail in the Osceola County Jail. He had no criminal record in the state, Florida Department of Law Enforcement records show.

Psychological struggles Last month, Miller stripped down to his boxers, then marched down an Osceola County road last month carrying a highpowered rifle.

The incident, which several friends and family described in detail this week to an Orlando Sentinel reporter, led to Miller being held for three days on Flor-

Matthew Baxter

Richard “Sam” Howard

ida’s Baker Act, which is used to involuntarily commit people going through a mental health crisis.

The 45-year-old Marine Corps veteran was struggling and lost.

After two decades, he left a successful military career in 2010 and came home to a world in which he didn’t know how to function. Numerous family members, including his mother, Joann Butler, say he was taking medications for post-traumatic stress disorder.

He’d talk to her about his time in the military, but would say he was “afraid someone would kill him for telling me what he had do-

Everett Glenn Miller

CHARLES W. CHERRY II / FLORIDA COURIER

This statue of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune currently stands on the campus of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. ical museum or cemetery, not in a place of honor.”

The corrective tweet came a day after the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that Nelson said, “I think leaving it up to the good sense of the communities involved is the best thing to do.”

While the debate rages in Florida and other states, President Donald Trump has used Twitter to bolster support for such monuments, say it was “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

Remembering slavery

get down on the ground if a car drove by their home and would patrol his home nightly, all because he was worried someone was after him, according to Butler, his aunts, cousins and friends.

He would break down often because he was haunted by thoughts that his work in the military led to deaths and destruction overseas, friends said.

and his wife, who have two adult children, divorced in 2015. He started changing and the within the last few months, those closest to him noticed.

“One moment he was smiling and the next he’d start punching the air, then he’d be crying,” his cousin Shaamar Bey said. “That’s not normal, having three different emotions in a few seconds.”

Miller worked as an imagery analyst specialist for a portion of his career and helped scout potential targets that were later bombed, said Garcia, who shared military stories with Miller because of his Air Force service.

He told Garcia through tears that he was haunted with thoughts that his work led to the deaths of women and children and the destruction of entire villages overseas, according to Garcia.

ne in there,” Butler said.

Childhood dream

Personality changes

Miller always wanted to be a Marine. He joined the military right out of high school in 1989 and quickly moved up the ranks, finishing his career after dozens of awards and three deployments during Operation Iraqi Freedom as a master sergeant, military records show.

Immediately after he was discharged, he did contract work as a civilian for a business near MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, then returned home to Kissimmee, friends said.

But the adjustment to civilian life was hard. He

Family members and friends say they had seen an even more drastic change in Miller recently after he lost his job and went through a rough breakup.

“For years and years of his life, he was programmed to live one way. He couldn’t move on. It was tearing him apart, and I saw his downward spiral,” said Edwin Garcia, 47, a high school classmate who reconnected with Miller this year. “He wasn’t the monster people think he was.”

He would tell others to

Another House Democrat is renewing a proposal to establish a Florida slavery memorial at the state Capitol. The idea died in the Senate during the 2017 legislative session.

Rep. Kionne McGhee, DMiami, filed the proposal (HB 67) this week for consideration during the 2018 session. The House this spring approved creation of slavery memorial, but the issue was not taken up in Senate committees.

McGhee’s bill would direct the Department of Management Services to develop a plan for a slav-

Threatening video An internal police memo said Miller posted a video on Facebook July 14 threat-

ery memorial at the Capitol Complex. The department also would manage the memorial.

“It is the intent of the Legislature to recognize the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the American colonies and to honor the nameless and forgotten men, women, and children who have gone unrecognized for their undeniable and weighty contributions to the United States,” the bill says.

Jim Turner and Dara Kam of the News Service of Florida contributed to this report.

ening police officers. The department warned the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, but neither Osceola County nor Kissimmee law enforcement agencies were told, because Miller had an Orange County address.

Records from the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office on the July 11 Baker Act incident were redacted and shed little light. After he was held, Butler said she pleaded for Osceola County deputies to take away his guns.

“He was not well. It was obvious he needed help and shouldn’t have any firearms,” she said. “I begged and begged them to take them.

“It’s not an excuse to what happened by any means but I think knowing his history helps people understand why,” Butler said. “We’re grieving for the families of these two officers – but our family is also grieving.”

Orlando Sentinel staff writers Gal Tziperman Lotan, Christal Hayes, and David Harris provided information for this report.

FLORIDA

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

Bill would add police to hate crimes law THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

Hate-crime protections would be extended to law-enforcement officers and other First respond-

ers under a measure reintroduced Monday by Sen. Rene Garcia, R-Hialeah.

Under the proposal (SB 178), criminal penalties would be increased when “crimes evidencing prejudice” are committed

against law-enforcement officers or other emergency workers.

As an example, first-degree misdemeanors would be upgraded to third-degree felonies in such cases. Tougher penalties are

already in place to deal with hate crimes based on race, color, ancestry, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, homeless status or advanced age.

Garcia's proposal also

A3

would extend the protection based on a victim's sex or creed.

The bill is filed for the 2018 legislative session, which starts in January.

Garcia proposed a similar measure for the 2017 session, but it did not get heard in committees.

Clemon Johnson

Judge rules against exFAMU coach in contract dispute

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A Leon County circuit judge has sided with Florida A&M University in a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed by former men's basketball coach Clemon Johnson, who was fired in April 2014 after three years in the job.

Judge James Shelfer this month issued a brief order granting summary judgment to the university.

Johnson, a former Florida A&M and NBA basketball player, argued, in part, that he had a four-year guaranteed contract and that the university breached it by firing him a year early for “convenience.” But FAMU argued in court documents that it followed university regulations in deciding not to reappoint Johnson.

“A review of the clear, unambiguous language of the agreement provides FAMU BOT (Board of Trustees) the right to terminate the agreement with a 60-day notice,” the university's attorneys argued in a motion for summary judgment.

“FAMU BOT has been consistent on this point in all of its employment agreements with head coaches.”

Hearing set on abortion waiting period A Leon County circuit judge will hear arguments in November about the constitutionality of a 2015 state law that would require women to wait 24 hours before having abortions.

Judge Terry Lewis is scheduled to hold a hearing Nov. 21 in the lawsuit filed by abortion-rights supporters, according to a notice filed last week. Lewis held a hearing in July but agreed to allow more time before deciding on the abortion rights' supporters motion for summary judgment.

The Florida Supreme Court this year approved a temporary injunction blocking the law from taking effect. The plaintiffs argue the law is an unconstitutional violation of the right to privacy, while the law's supporters say it would give women more time to consider whether they want to have abortions.

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Everybody hates you.

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EDITORIAL

A4

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

Charlottesville revealed Republican and Democratic hypocrisy One thing that the Charlottesville tragedy laid bare for all to see was the hypocrisy of Republicans and Democrats on race and violence.

CLARENCE V. MCKEE, ESQ.

First the Republicans It seems that every major national and statewide Republican of note rushed to condemn the White supremacy represented by those in Charlottesville protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The question for them: now that you have joined the anti-racism chorus and criticized President Trump for his responses on the matter, what have you done in your own spheres of influence to fight racism and foster racial dialogue?

For Congressional Republicans, senators, governors and candidates for statewide office who have been so quick to condemn racism: • How many Blacks are on your senior staffs, especially those of you who have significant Black populations in your Districts or states?

• How many of you have Black political consultants who share in the lucrative contracts of your campaign committees and have town meetings in your Black communities?

• As to Senator John McCain, RNev., and Mitt Romney who have commented on Charlottesville, if you are so concerned about race relations, why did your presidential campaigns all but ignore Blacks?

No respect The list of Black Republicans for local, state, and national office who have advised me of how their candidacies and constituencies have received the back of

GUEST COMMENTARY

the hand from local, state, and national Republican campaign organizations is too extensive to list.

Listen to George Farrell, Chairman of BLAKPAC which works for the election of conservative Black and White officeholders such as successful Georgia GOP Congressional candidate Karen Handle, who said: “I am greatly dismayed at how many GOP candidates for local, state, and federal offices have no desire to appeal to Black voters!”

Former Florida Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll summed it up nicely: “In the 21st century, it is unfortunate that the most significant accomplishments regarding Blacks that Republicans can point to – other than the historic and key appointments of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice under George W. Bush – was the crucial role Republicans played in the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 respectively – in the last century – and that Lincoln freed the slaves!”

Now the Democrats While national Democrat leaders almost en masse condemned the violence and hateful rhetoric of White supremacist protesters in Charlottesville, they have been mostly silent and turned a blind eye to expressions of hatred and violence from the left. They did not rush to condemn and disavow: • Missouri Democrat State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, who wrote, “I hope Trump is assassinated.”

• Black Lives Matter movement anti-cop protesters chanting, “Pigs in a blanket fry ’em like bacon.”

• New York demonstrators shouting they wanted “dead cops…now.”

• Masked anti-Trump protesters who burned cars and smashed windows at the inauguration.

• Mobs with clubs and shields who set fires, threw Molotov cocktails and smashed windows at Berkeley.

Wait, there’s more This past weekend we saw two more examples of Democrats’ hypocrisy: the failure to condemn the killing of two police officers in Kissimmee, and the shooting of four others – two in Jacksonville, Fla., and two in Pennsylvania; and the refusal to disavow the anti-police rhetoric of protestors in Texas who chanted, “oink, oink, bang, bang,” and “cops and Klan go hand-in-hand.”

The same media that rushed to get Republicans to comment on Trump’s Charlottesville statements rarely if ever finds the time to ask Democrats to comment on or disavow the hateful comments and actions cited above!

Progressives and Democrats seem to think that they are the only ones entitled to use inciteful and inflammatory language without consequence. We have seen Democrats feed the political vitriol by turning a blind eye to Kathy Griffin’s beheaded image of the president and the portrayal of the assassination of the president in a New York play.

If White supremacists see Democrats and left-wing protesters getting away with violent conduct and hateful language with little if any condemnation or accountability from the media or Democrat leaders, why shouldn’t they

Trump and America’s fascist forefathers Donald Trump was even more agitated and combative than usual at his recent Trump Tower press conference.

How could he draw a line to separate the “neo-Nazis” and assorted “White supremacists” that had descended on Charlottesville – one of whom used his car to crush the life out of a young woman – and the “very fine people” that favored keeping Robert E. Lee’s statue on its pedestal in (recently renamed) Emancipation Park?

The answer And where would the racist-removal project end? The answer, as somebody once said, was blowing in the wind.

“So this week, it is Robert E. Lee,” warned Trump. “I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?

You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

There is nothing wrong with Trump’s logic. If the legacy of slavery is to be excised root and branch, then nothing less than the most profound social transformation is in order.

Why stop there?

Why stop with statues of long dead men? If you rightly condemn Washington and Jefferson

Worldwide power GLEN FORD BLACK AGENDA REPORT

as loathsome oppressors of humanity, you are then obligated to purge the nation and world of the poisoned fruit of their racist perversion.

What these forefathers “brought forth on this continent” was “a new nation, conceived” NOT in liberty, nor was it dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal.

According to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s Dred Scott decision, the United States was founded as a White man’s country in which “neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument” (the Declaration of Independence).

In 1857, when Taney made his ruling, the value of US slaves was greater than every other national asset except the land within its borders – land that was itself stolen from the indigenous peoples, and much of which would be valueless without slave labor.

The super-profits of the slave production system had made the United States a global economic power, the second great industrial power on Earth – right behind Britain, where US slaveproduced cotton was the engine of its globalizing juggernaut.

Through ruthless exploitation of captive Black bodies – as Edward Baptist writes in “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” – “the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation of global influence.”

US imperialism is rooted in the rapacious expansionism of the slave system. George Washington envisioned the new nation as a “rising empire.” Jefferson spoke of an “empire of liberty” – meaning, the liberties he enjoyed from the labor (and sexual exploitation) of the slaves.

Racial rationalizations White supremacy legitimized every avarice of the new nation.

The Monroe Doctrine staked the exclusive US claim to dominate the Western Hemisphere – regarded as populated by inferior and “mongrel” races – an “exceptionalism” Washington now insists extends to the entire planet.

Random thoughts of a free Black mind, v. 303 QUICK TAKES FROM #2: STRAIGHT, NO CHASER

CHARLES W. CHERRY II, ESQ. PUBLISHER

Why I understand Donald Trump’s rabid supporters – They are mirror images of Barack Obama fanatics.

To paraphrase King Don, Bro. Prez could have shot somebody dead on any MLK Drive, Street or Boulevard in Black America, and most Black Americans

VISUAL VIEWPOINT: MODERN TERRORISM

would still have supported him.

(The only way Obama would have lost Black political support would have been for him to have divorced Michelle, left the kids, moved out of the White House, and shacked up with a fat White blond-haired, blue-eyed exstripper high school dropout

JOEP BERTRAMS, THE NETHERLANDS

say, “It’s our turn to reciprocate” as they did in Charlottesville?

How many Black jobs and diplomas will that produce?

Dangerous and deadly

Saying it again

Racial identity politics is dangerous, no matter who plays the game – White supremacists like those in Charlottesville, or Black and White Democrats who have made it an art form, especially over the past eight years!

Democratic politicians pretend they want racial harmony and nonviolence, but, insist on fostering racial division with inflammatory rhetoric that exploits emotions and heightens tensions.

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean implies that the GOP is the party of racism; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, DCa., and Senator Corey Booker, DN.J., want to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol; and Reverend Al Sharpton wants to end all public funding for the Jefferson memorial!

I have written previously that the unchallenged, vitriolic and venomous language and violence of the left was going to “get someone hurt…or worse” and would not stop until it led to a “political execution.” Unfortunately, those predictions came to pass in Virginia and Charlottesville.

Democrats and their allies on the left are playing a dangerous game exploiting racial identity politics. It is only a matter of time before it results in more violence, injury, and death!

Fascism, including the Nazi variety, is not some strange European social disease. After crushing Black Reconstruction, the Southern states invented, from the bottom up, the world’s first totally racially regimented society.

US “Jim Crow” inspired Adolph Hitler’s vision for nation-building under Aryan supremacy, as documented in James Q. Whitman’s recent book, “Hitler’s American Model.” American fascism predated – and has long outlived – the European variety.

indigenous American fascism.

The Democratic Party, which founded this homegrown fascism, was now popularly identified as a haven for the nation’s racial and ethnic “Others.”

However, the Democrats continued to pursue national reconciliation, as did the Republicans during the old Jim Crow.

What is ‘fascism’?

It is generally accepted that fascist states are characterized, to one degree or another, by extreme nationalism; frequent resort to mob rule; oppression of an internal “Other” as an organizing principle; militarism; and the political dominance of the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie.

All these characteristics describe the Southern states of the US during the nearly century-long period between the death of Reconstruction and the triumph of the civil rights movement. Moreover, the post-Reconstruction reconciliation between North and South guaranteed that the Southern fascism model would leave its imprint on the larger American political economy.

In the aftermath of the Sixties, the Republican section of the corporate electoral duopoly assumed the role of the White Man’s Party – the purer party of – think of pre-surgery “Mama June” from the “Honey Boo Boo” reality show as his new “boo.”)

My point? People who think that King Don’s nods and winks to White supremacists; his catfights with mainstream Republicans; his bombastic attacks on the media; his daily White House drama; and/or his “tweetstorm lies” – will eventually cause his support to crater, are dreaming, doing drugs, or both.

Charles W. Cherry II, Esq., Publisher

Opinions expressed on this editorial page are those of the writers, and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of the newspaper or the publisher.

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Common ground Even as the two parties were switching racial constituencies, they found common cause in imposing a “New” Jim Crow – the mass Black incarceration regime that spread to all parts of the country with astounding speed at the close of the Sixties, and which is the most dramatic domestic expression of American fascism.

The Democrats and Republicans are as close as “lips and teeth,” as the Chinese say, when it comes to US imperialism. They both belong to the War Party, committed to unfettered US expansion and endless warfare against the darker peoples of the world – a national mission that began with Washington and Jefferson – and must be undone.

Donald Trump warned that, by knocking the icons off their pedestals, “You are changing history; you’re changing culture.”

Not quite. But it’s a small start.

Glen Ford is executive editor of BlackAgendaReport.com. Email him at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

To the fanatics, you are either for their man or against him. How do I know? I bear many a verbal stripe for making the same demands of Obama that I demand from Trump, i.e., the end of the disproportionate pain Black America continues to suffer as a consequence of U.S. government laws, policies, and practices…

I’m @ccherry2 on Twitter.

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AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

Trump apes ‘stupid’ Obama who aped ‘crusading’ Bush in Afghanistan Like Barack Obama, Donald Trump made ending America’s longest war a signature promise of his presidential campaign. Now, ANTHONY L. like Obama, he’s reneging on that HALL, ESQ. promise just months into his presidency.

FLORIDA COURIER On Monday, President Trump COLUMNIST took greater ownership of a protracted conflict that he had long dismissed as a waste of time and that it is even less likely to help, especially given Trump’s provocaresources. tive invitation for its archrival India to help too.

Toward victory?

And one must wonder about “From now on, victory will have Trump’s conspicuous failure to a clear definition: attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crush- mention any measures to counter ing al-Qaeda, preventing the Tali- the destabilizing influence Russia ban from taking over the country, and Iran are wielding in this counand stopping mass terror attacks try, both of whom are supplying against Americans before they the Taliban with improved weaponry in Afghanistan. emerge,” Trump said.

Despite his “kumbayaa” preamble and trademark bluster, Here’s the deal Trump’s plan for victory amounts Since launching my weblog 13 to nothing more than a continua- years ago, I have written counttion of Obama’s, which amounted less commentaries decrying the to nothing more than a continua- folly of America’s involvement in tion of Bush’s.

Afghanistan. But here is a semiBut at least Bush and Obama nal excerpt from my September had a clear understanding of their 23, 2009 column. In a curious bit respective plans and demonstrat- of symmetry, I wrote it around this ed a good faith belief that it might time in Obama’ presidency – after work. Nobody can say the same he announced his fateful plan to even of “Teleprompter Don” in ei- ape Bush. ther respect.

[N]ation building in Afghanistan (even under the guise of a Same conditions ‘counterinsurgency strategy’) is no For example, he made much longer advisable or feasible. Inado about announcing that “con- deed, all indications are that the ditions on the ground,” not arbi- die has been cast for this ‘good trary timetables, will determine war.’

Accordingly, the US legacy the withdrawal of US troops.

But past being prologue, condi- there will be distinguished either tions on the ground are bound to by a terminally wounded nationremain such that he might as well al pride – as American forces beat have announced that US troops a hasty retreat in defeat (followwill be in Afghanistan for the next ing the Russian precedent), or by 200 years, which he famously he thousands more American solridiculed would be the result if diers being lost in Afghanistan’s “stupid” presidents like Bush and ‘graveyard of empires’ – as they continue fighting this unwinnaObama had their way.

(By the way, wasn’t the Moth- ble war (following America’s own er of All Bombs – MOAB – sup- Vietnam precedent): more troops posed to change conditions on the only mean more sitting ducks for Taliban fighters… ground, decisively?)

Obama would be well-advised Then there’s the manifest absurdity of relying on Pakistan to help to cut America’s losses and rewith Afghanistan the way he relied treat ASAP; let the Afghans govern on China to help with North Ko- themselves however they like; and rea. Anyone who knows anything rely on Special Forces to disrupt about Pakistan’s nefarious in- and dismantle Taliban and alvolvement in Afghanistan knows Qaeda operations in-country and

Having educational options helped my daughters Parents around Florida may be celebrating “back to school” after a long summer with their kids, but we also secretly hope we’ve done right by our children with the choices we’ve made for them.

Choices that include where our children attend school.

My three daughters grew up in a neighborhood drowning with poverty. We became a family that endured sickness and, for a time, homelessness. That wasn’t the destiny I wanted for my girls.

I knew that education, including access to college, was a key ingredient to better jobs and a better life.

Makes a difference Thankfully, we live in a state that empowers parents with educational choices for their children. For the first time this year, more than 100,000 low-income and working-class students will

EBONY SMITH GUEST COMMENTARY

be using the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which gives them the opportunity to attend private schools that may be a better fit for them. My girls and I know what a difference that can make.

After elementary school ended, we visited our neighborhood middle school during an open house that can only be described as “chaos.” My efforts to set up parent-teacher conferences before the start of the year were even declined. I know this is not this is not the experience of many parents, but we felt unwanted and began to look for other edu-

Making racism bad for business In 2015, CNN reported that 49 percent of Americans thought that racism was a big problem in the United States.

Not surprisingly, people of color and Whites had significantly differing views regarding the subject. Sixty-six percent of Blacks and 64 percent of Hispanics thought that racism was a big problem, while only 43 percent of Whites saw it that way.

My thinking Two thoughts come to mind.

One, the oppressor and the oppressed rarely see oppression in the same light. Two, logic and deduction suggest that, with the events of the past several years, the percentages of the population considering racism as a big problem have increased. The recent circumstances of Charlottesville, Va., seem to support my

DR. E. FAYE WILLIAMS, ESQ. TRICE EDNEY WIRE

second assumption.

Sadly, the person who most Americans have come to expect to shepherd our nation through situations of racial strife and division, the president of the United States, has proven himself impotent in the matter and incapable of making cogent decisions regarding the nature of human or race relations. I unequivocally consider him completely unfit to render reasoned judgment in race-based matters.

Long history We’re reminded that Maya An-

EDITORIAL

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VISUAL VIEWPOINT: TRUMP ON AFGHANISTAN

on aerial drones to attack their havens in the mountainous regions of Pakistan.

Crazy strategy Obviously, Trump would be well-advised to do the same. Unfortunately, like Bush and Obama, he seems determined to repeat the mistakes US presidents made during the Vietnam War. Only this ‘Vietnamization’ explains Trump’s military advisers thinking that 15,000 troops can do what 150,000 could not. Crazy!

And all this just because the generals invariably convince each president they serve that he does not want to go down in history as the president who lost this war.

Again, crazy!

By the way, Steve Bannon is the nationalist White House adviser who got fired last week. He was reportedly advising Trump to “privatize US operations in Afghanistan.”

But this outsourcing smacks of the Banana Republic madness that has the president of the Philippines relying on vigilantes to fight that country’s war on drugs – with all the reckless and feckless carnage that entails.

Not to mention suspicions that Bannon hoped to get kickbacks from the bounty of $10 billion annually, which his favored contractor, latter-day Viking Erik Prince, would charge the US government for his militia’s mercenary services.

In any event, it has been self-evident from the outset of this war that non-Taliban Afghans are all too happy to let the Americans fight their battles.

Not all-powerful But the longer American soldiers remain mired in this unwinnable war, the more they will undermine the American military’s reputation of invincibility. And the more they undermine that reputation, the more not just the Taliban but tin-pot dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un will feel emboldened to fight the United States – Trump’s “fire and fury” bluster notwithstanding.

Of course, it hardly instills fear in any adversary to have merchant ships and oil tankers ramming US cational options.

Top education At first, we tried a charter school that emphasized arts and theater, but eventually I felt there wasn’t enough focus on academics. With a little more research, I discovered Academy Prep in Tampa and with the help of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, I could provide my girls with a top-notch private prep school education.

Academy Prep challenged each of my girls, raising the bar every year.

Imani, my cheerleader and theatrical singer, eventually graduated from Berkeley Prep and Bard College in New York. She’s now a financial services specialist at Regions Bank.

Esme, my quiet middle child, graduated from Tampa Bay Christian and attends Hillsborough Community College, where she studies accounting.

My youngest, Eliya, just graduated from Tampa Bay Christian and is about to leave the nest for Southeastern University. Overcoming her own adversities, ingelou stated, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” President No. 45 has given us an ample number of opportunities to assess who he is.

In 1973, the Trump Organization was charged with federal housing discrimination. In 1989, when five Black and Latino youth were coerced into admitting rape, 45 was conspicuous in his condemnation. In 2016, after DNA testing exonerated them, 45 still called for their execution.

And then there was the seven-year ‘birther’ attack on President Obama. Few details remain undisclosed about that except that it provides great insight into the racial animus inherent in 45.

That’s why when 45 tried to justify the actions of the KKK, neoNazis and alt-right in Charlottesville, I was not surprised.

What surprised me was the swift, almost immediate resignation of Merck CEO Ken Frazier from 45’s Manufacturing Jobs

NATE BEELER, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

battleships out of commission….

To be fair, US soldiers have shown valor beyond the call of duty during this 16-year war. But it should be instructive that, despite their best efforts, military advisers readily admit that America is “not winning.”

Indeed, you’d think even warmongering generals would be loath to waste more blood and treasure waging it – given the 2,250 soldiers already killed and nearly $1 trillion already spent.

‘Acceptable loss’ However, based on the Vietnam toll of 58,000 killed, I suspect military advisers would consider another 2,250 killed over the next 16 years an “acceptable loss.” And everything we know about the military-industrial complex suggests that they would not care how much it costs to continue waging this “forever” war.

As I opined in July 2016, “Why should the United States be any more willing to keep troops stationed in Afghanistan to defend it from the Taliban than it was to keep them stationed in Vietnam to defend it from the Viet Cong?

Especially given that the spread of communism posed a far greater existential threat to the United States back then than the spread of jihadism poses today. Hell, we have more to fear from the mercenary ideology of the NRA than the religious ideology of Islamic Jihad.”

Incidentally, it’s patently specious to justify continued US involvement in Afghanistan by citing US troops still stationed in postwar Germany. For starters, “postcluding a diagnosis with Graves’ disease, she earned more than $10,000 in college scholarships.

My girls beat the odds, and I know it was because they received an excellent education thanks to the scholarship.

Saving money

war” is the operative distinction.

Moreover, those troops never had Nazis trying to kill them while they were trying to help other Germans rebuild their country (namely West Germany).

Unfocused media Unfortunately, political reporters and pundits are too busy covering the silly folly of Bannon’s firing threatening internecine “war” within the Republican Party to focus on the tragic follies of this war.

Finally, you’d be forgiven the impression that Trump looked more like a “Saturday Night Live” caricature of himself than a commander-in-chief when he addressed the nation about Afghanistan. No doubt recent reports on members of his own Republican Party questioning not just his moral authority and professional competence but even his mental stability reinforced this impression.

Trump’s Nazi-coddling statements on the August 12 terrorist attack in Charlottesville proved the tipping point for their belated questioning. So if the real mission of was to put an MLK spin on Trump’s Charlottesville statements, “Mission Accomplished.”

NOTE: The only way to stop American presidents these days from sending kids to die in politically motivated wars is to reinstate the draft, which I argued for in writing in 2007.

Anthony L. Hall is a native of The Bahamas with an international law practice in Washington, D.C. Read his columns and daily weblog at www.theipinionsjournal.com. money from public schools and hurting public schools. But when the judges asked for evidence, the plaintiffs couldn’t provide any.

Still struggling Many inner-city schools were troubled long before the scholarship began 15 years ago, and many struggle to this day. Education can help stop the cycle of poverty, but only if students have access to options that work best for them.

The scholarship program is just one way to do that.

I’ve seen Florida grow in many ways since my children first enrolled in elementary school.

We have charter schools, virtual schools, magnet schools. Even scholarships to help children with special needs. I’m just happy the options I discovered worked wonders for my daughters.

I hope the 100,000 students on the tax credit scholarship this year find just as much success.

I know there are critics out there that want school choice programs, like the tax credit scholarship, to end. They believe the scholarship diverts money from public schools that could benefit from the resources.

But this is a fiction. Last year, the scholarship was worth $5,886, while per-pupil spending in Florida public schools was more than $10,000. The value of the scholarship has always been less than funding in public schools. That’s why every study shows it doesn’t drain public money. It saves public money!

That’s also why Florida courts dismissed the recent lawsuit that tried to kill the scholarship program. The teachers’ union, Ebony Smith is a Tampa resiNAACP and other plaintiffs tried to argue the program was taking dent.

Initiative Council, which led to further CEO defections. This ultimately led to dissolution of both the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and Strategy and Policy Forum.

This series of events was a catastrophic defeat for 45’s administration, political agenda and, more importantly, his fragile ego.

One lesson is clear. Racism and hatred are not good for business.

They may satisfy the needs and ignorance of small, petty minds, but are counter-productive in business.

Dollar power Collectively, the annual buying power of Blacks and Hispanics exceeds $3 trillion, and this does not include any of the other groups targeted by the hate groups in Charlottesville. The facts of OUR economic power do not go unnoticed to business or stockholders.

Legitimate business leaders recognize that their businesses

cannot thrive in an environment that supports discrimination and division. Moreover, they realize that violence and the lack of social order are destructive to their businesses and our nation’s future.

The greater lesson taught by this experience is that OUR DOLLARS MATTER. Next to our votes, our dollars matter most.

Our challenge is learning how to best leverage political, public or corporate opinion and action with our economic power.

We must support those businesses that support our interests AND we must let them know why we support them. While not solving all the social ills we face, our effective control of our resources will take us a long way in that direction.

Dr. E. Faye Williams is national chair of the National Congress of Black Women, Inc. Contact her via www.nationalcongressbw.org.

TOJ A6

NATION

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

After a gap year, Malia Obama heads to Harvard Former president’s daughter started school this week

BY KATHERINE SKIBA CHICAGO TRIBUNE/TNS

WASHINGTON – Malia Obama was 10 years old and in the fifth grade when her father became president, and this week she starts a new chapter.

She’s off to Harvard, ending a gap year that sparked a national conversation about the trend and unfolded across multiple continents.

Harvard’s dorms opened to freshmen Tuesday, and classes begin Aug. 30. The university is a familiar place for Obama’s alumni parents, who both graduated from Harvard Law School.

Not on her own It also is no stranger to celebrity students and is the alma mater of eight U.S. presidents.

That President Barack Obama’s friends and former administration officials hold faculty posts at Harvard means his daughter won’t be entirely on her own. A Secret Service detail will ensure that too.

“How time flies,” said Anita McBride, a chief of staff for Laura Bush, whose daughters Barbara and Jenna greeted Michelle Obama and her daughters at the White House after the 2008 election.

The White House florist had made bouquets for the Obama girls. The Bush daughters gave them the grand tour, teaching them how to slide down the banister in the solarium.

Friendly advice The departing White House daughters also gave the Obama girls a friendly letter full of their well wishes and advice.

“Here’s a girl who’s grown up in the public eye and who’s been able to maintain a normal, private life and make regular, everyday decisions about her education and life choices,” McBride said.

“She took advantage of a very

OLIVIER DOULIERY/ABACA PRESS/TNS

Malia Obama leaves the State Dining room of the White House on Jan. 12 in Washington, D.C. interesting opportunity at a very unique time in her life, an in-between time in her life.”

Less pressure Delaying her Harvard start meant that Malia Obama, 19, would arrive on campus with less visibility and pressure than had she started in 2016 during her father’s final months in the White House, said McBride, who is now with American University’s School of Public Affairs.

After Barack Obama left office, the family moved into a house in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, letting Sasha Obama finish Sidwell Friends School, from which Malia Obama graduated in 2016. Sasha, 16, will graduate from Sidwell in 2019.

The Obamas announced in May 2016 that Malia Obama had

been accepted to Harvard but was taking a gap year.

Cross-cultural trip The year according to news accounts, included an extended trip last fall to Bolivia and Peru, a journey reportedly organized by a Boulder, Colo., company called Where There Be Dragons. Eva Vanek, director of admissions for the company, declined to talk about Malia Obama but spoke generally about its gap-year and summer programs, saying they operated in 19 countries in Asia, Africa and South and Central America.

The aim is a cross-cultural, experiential education, Vanek said.

That means no five-star hotels or fancy buses, but rather stays with local families, volunteer work, trips on public buses and often,

language immersion.

The small-group trips “aren’t touristic. They aim to broaden students’ perspectives about the world and themselves through these really intimate experiences,” she said.

The goal is to let participants become “competent travelers and more evolved humans,” Vanek added.

Lollapalooza too Last February, Malia Obama started an internship with the Weinstein Co., an employee there said. It’s a film and television production and distribution company founded by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein.

She hit the Sundance Film Festival in January, was spotted in Aspen, Colo., in February, traveled in June with her parents and

sister to Bali and rocked out with her younger sister in August at Chicago’s Lollapalooza.

Class of 2021 Because of her gap year, Malia Obama will join Harvard’s Class of 2021, an exclusive group about to get an expensive education.

Harvard’s tuition, fees, room and board run $65,509 for the upcoming school year, though many students get need-based financial aid. Only 5.4 percent of the 39,041 students who applied to be in the Class of 2020 were admitted: 2,110 students.

Altogether Harvard has about 6,700 undergraduates and 14,500 graduate and professional students.

Aug. 12, called “Unite the Right,” was met by counter-protesters. The two sides shouted and threw objects at each other, and then a man drove a car into the crowd of counter-protesters, killing a women and injuring 19 other people.

The night of Aug. 14, a crowd gathered in Durham around the Confederate Soldiers Monument, a gun-toting bronze atop a granite pedestal outside the old Durham County Courthouse.

A woman climbed a ladder and draped a rope around the statue’s neck, and people on the ground toppled the figure from its perch.

The crowd cheered and ran forward to kick the crumpled form.

White power symbols

CASEY TOTH/THE HERALD-SUN/TNS

Protesters celebrate after topping a statue of a Confederate solder in downtown Durham, N.C. on Aug. 14. The crowd gathered to protest the violence in Charlottesville, Va. following a march by White supremacists on Aug. 12.

Some Christians see God’s plan for White supremacy in Confederate statues

BY MARTHA QUILLIN NEWS & OBSERVER

RALEIGH, N.C. — Those who bothered to glance at the Confederate memorial that stood until last Monday outside the old county courthouse in Durham may have seen its boy who wore the gray as a quaint relic of an Old South.

To White supremacists, the monument and hundreds like it represent something more enduring than bronze or granite.

Believers in White supremacy see in Confederate statuary symbols of a deeply held belief that God intended for White men to dominate the household, the community and the country, according to a longtime North Car-

‘In their vision of the world, a properly ordered home and a properly ordered society begin with men at the top. And in this country, that translated to White men being on top.’

Willie James Jennings olina pastor who teaches theology at Yale Divinity School.

Their vision “The way they understand history has to do with the rise of the White man as God’s representative in the world,” said Willie James Jennings, who preached at Baptist and Presbyterian church-

es in North Carolina for three decades.

“In their vision of the world, a properly ordered home and a properly ordered society begin with men at the top. And in this country, that translated to White men being on top.”

To those who believe in the supremacy of White men, Jennings

said, there is no more heroic figure than that of a Civil War hero who fought for the Confederacy and tried to preserve a way of life in which — in hindsight, at least — White men ruled all.

‘Form of idolatry’ Jennings, who wrote “The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race,” said many White supremacists identify as Christian. I It is no surprise, he said, that they would rally around an oversized statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee on horseback in a park in Charlottesville, Va., to protest its planned removal.

“It’s the worship of a civic image of a powerful White man who orders the world in the way it should be,” Jennings said. “That’s what they’re worshiping. It’s a form of idolatry. God hates idolatry.”

Figure toppled The

Charlottesville

protest

The many hundreds of Confederate statues and monuments that stand across the South generated strong emotions when they were erected too.

“They were intended to,” said Myrick Howard, president of Preservation NC and a lecturer in historic preservation at UNC’s Department of City & Regional Planning.

Most of the statues were minted around the turn of the 20th century, when African-Americans were making social gains and there was a large wave of immigrants pouring into the U.S., or during the 1950s and ’60s, during the American civil rights movement.

“They were intended to raise White supremacy and dash any hopes of African-Americans,” Howard said. “They were symbols of white power, no question about it.”

Locked in pride Jennings, the pastor and Bible scholar, said claiming White supremacy as God’s intent, and using statues of Confederate Civil War heroes as symbols of a racist belief, reflects poorly on the Christian faith.

“It bothers me that these folks are Christian and doing this,” he said. “They are Christians, but they are Christians doing horrible things. They are Christians locked in their disobedience and their pride.”

The News & Observer is based in Raleigh, N.C.

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AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

SHARING BLACK LIFE, STATEWIDE

Showtime film a raw portrait of Houston See page B5

SOUTH FLORIDA / TREASURE COAST AREA

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REMEMBERING

DICK GREGORY Groundbreaking comedian and civil rights activist dies at 84

S. Thompson was one of his most vocal supporters.

In the late ’60s, he began going on 40-day fasts to protest the Vietnam War.

Khomeini visit In 1980, impatient with President Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iranian hostage crisis, he flew to Iran and began a fast, had a “ceremonial visit” with revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and met with the revolutionary students inside the embassy.

After 4½ months in Iran, his weight down to 106 pounds, he returned home.

But before Dick Gregory the activist, there was Dick Gregory the groundbreaking comedian.

He was a struggling 28-year-old stand-up comic in Chicago who had launched his career in small Black clubs when he received a life-changing, lastminute phone call from his agent in January 1961: The prestigious Playboy Club in Chicago needed someone to fill in for comedian Irwin Corey on Sunday night.

BY DENNIS MCLELLAN LOS ANGELES TIMES/TNS

D

ick Gregory, who became the first Black stand-up comic to break the color barrier in major nightclubs in the early 1960s, a decade in which he satirized segregation and race relations in his act and launched his lifetime commitment to civil rights and other social justice issues, died Sunday. He was 84.

His death was confirmed on his official social media accounts by his family.

“It is with enormous sadness that the Gregory family confirms that their father, comedic legend and civil rights activist Mr. Dick Gregory departed this earth tonight in Washington, D.C.,” his son Christian Gregory wrote.

Even before the confirmation from the family, Rev. Jesse Jackson, a longtime friend of Gregory’s, had memorialized him in a tweet: “He taught us how to laugh. He taught us how to fight. He taught us how to live. Dick Gregory was committed to justice. I miss him already.”

Self-described agitator The former Southern Illinois University track star became known as an author, lecturer, nutrition guru and self-described agitator who marched, ran and fasted to call attention to issues ranging from police brutality to world famine.

An invitation from civil rights leader Medgar Evers to speak at voter registration rallies in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962 launched Gregory into what he called “the civil rights fight.”

FREDDIE ALLEN/AMG/NNPA

Popular chicken joke Top: Dick Gregory speaks at a panel discussion on the protests in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting of Michael Brown.

Above: A photo of Gregory in 1964.

He was frequently arrested for his activities in the ’60s, and once spent five days in jail in Birmingham, Alabama after joining demonstrators in 1963 at the request of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Presidential candidate Gregory, who was shot in the leg while trying to help defuse the Watts riots in 1965, made a failed run for mayor of Chicago as a write-in candidate in 1967.

A year later, he ran for president as a write-in candidate for the Freedom and Peace Party, a splinter group of the Peace and Freedom Party. Hunter

Gregory was so broke he had to borrow a quarter from his landlord for bus fare downtown. Never mind that his audience turned out to be a convention of White frozen-food-industry executives from the South.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Gregory said, coolly eyeing the audience. “I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent 20 years there one night. …

“Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant, and this White waitress came up to me and said: ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said: ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people.

Bring me a whole fried chicken.’ ”

Won over crowd Despite having to deal with what he later described as “dirty, little, insulting statements” from some members of the audience, the heckling soon See GREGORY, Page B2

“He taught us how to laugh. He taught us how to fight. He taught us how to live.

Dick Gregory was committed to justice. I miss him already.”

Rev. Jesse Jackson

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AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

STOJ

FLORIDA COMMUNITY CALENDAR Orlando: Catch Bryson Tiller with H.E.R. and Metro Boomin at the CFE Arena on Aug. 30.

Fort Lauderdale: The Women of Color Empowerment Conference is Sept.

8-10 at the Westin Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort.

Speakers will include Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Details: www. southfloridawomenofcolor. com Jacksonville: Damian Marley’s Stony Hill Fall Tour stops at Mavericks Rock N’Honky Tonk on Sept. 10, Sept. 12 at House of Blues Orlando and Sept. 13 at St. Petersburg’s Jannus Landing.

Tampa: Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, Nephew Tommy of the “Steve Harvey Morning Show,’’ Tank and Kelly Price are scheduled Sept. 2 at the USF Sun Dome.

FLORIDA A&M

Florida A&M takes on the Texas Southern Tigers on Aug. 26 in its season opener at Bragg Memorial Stadium in Tallahassee. FILE PHOTO

B-CU

Bethune-Cookman University’s football team faces the University of Miami on Sept. 2 at Hard Rock Stadium. KIM GIBSON/FLORIDA COURIER

KIM FIELDS

Actress Kim Fields will be one of the celebs at this year’s 2017 Allstate Tom Joyner Family Reunion. It’s Aug. 31-Sept. 4 in Kissimmee. Full schedule: BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Orlando: The 15th Annual Caribbean Health Summit is at the Central Florida Fair & Exposition Park Sept. 9 from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Info: www.cmwp.org.

St. Petersburg: Lil Wayne is scheduled Sept. 1 at Jannus Live in St. Petersburg.

Miami: Lauryn Hill and Nas will perform Sept.

23 at the Bayfront Park Amphitheater and Sept.

GREGORY

‘Positive, cool vibes’ With his three-button black suit, a swirl of smoke from his ever-present cigarette and his un-

Tampa: Chris Tucker with guest D.L. Hughley will be at the Amalie Arena on Sept. 8.

Jacksonville: The Mighty Love Tour stops at the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts on Sept.

30.

Orlando: Nick Cannon’s Wild ’N Out Live! will be at the CFE Arena on Sept. 23 at 8 p.m.

Miami: Tickets are on sale for Kendrick Lamar’s Damn Tour on Sept. 2 at the AmericanAirlines Arena and Sept. 10 at Tampa’s Amalie Arena.

St. Petersburg: Catch Marlon Wayans on Sept.

19 at The Mahaffey Theater for an 8 p.m. show.

Miami: The Mann’s World Concert and Comedy Show with David and Tamela Mann stops at the James L. Knight Center on Sept. 1.

St. Petersburg: Maxwell is scheduled Sept. 1 at The Mahaffey Theater.

He received an athletic scholarship to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he became captain of the crosscountry and track teams and the school’s fastest half-miler.

His education was interrupted in 1954 when he was drafted into the Army, where his wisecracks and nonmilitary demeanor earned him an ultimatum from a colonel: Either enter and win an open talent show at the service club or face a court-martial.

Gregory won the contest, with jokes such as explaining how the Army charged him $85 when he lost his rifle: “That’s why in the Navy, the captain always goes down with his ship.”

After winning two more contests, he was placed in Special Services.

‘Refreshing’ act

From his success at the Playboy Club, which a Newsweek writer later observed marked the death of Jim Crow “in the joke world,” Gregory’s career quickly snowballed.

Jack Paar read about him in Time and invited him on his latenight show. That led to a booking at the fashionable Blue Angel in New York City.

The New York Times soon ran a profile of Gregory, as did Esquire magazine later in the year.

He also signed a contract for his first comedy album, “In Living Black and White.”

“Greg opened the door,” comedian and future TV star Redd Foxx told The New York Times in 1961. “Somebody had to be first. There’s room for all of us. He can’t work Pittsburgh and Glocca Morra the same night.”

Miami Beach: Tickets are available for a 2 Chainz show at the Jackie Gleason Theater on Sept. 19.

College, military

stopped as Gregory won them over with his provocatively funny but nonbelligerent satirical humor.

“Segregation is not all bad,” he said on stage. “Have you ever heard of a wreck where the people on the back of the bus got hurt?”

What was supposed to be a 55-minute show, Gregory later recalled, went on for about 1 hour and 40 minutes. And by the time he walked off stage, the audience gave him a thundering ovation.

He did so well, he was booked at the club for two weeks and then held over for several more.

Career snowballs

Amelia Island: The Northside Community Involvement, Inc. of Jacksonville is hosting its 12th Annual Golf Tournament of Unity fundraiser on Aug. 26 at Ocean Links Golf Course.

More info: Rhynett Chatman, 904-660-2157.

— and was president of his graduating class.

from Page 1

That February, a Time magazine writer who caught Gregory’s act at the Playboy Club painted a glowing portrait of a man who, with “intelligence, sophistication, and none of the Black-voice buffoonery of Amos ’n’ Andy,” had “become the first Negro comedian to make his way into the nightclub big time.”

“What makes Gregory refreshing,” the writer observed, “is not only that he feels secure enough to joke about the trials and triumphs of his own race, but that he can laugh, in a sort of brotherhood of humor, with White men about their own problems, can joke successfully about the NAACP as well as the PTA.”

23 at Daily’s Place in Jacksonville.

GABRIEL G. TAIT/TNS

Civil rights activists Dick Gregory, center, and actor Chris Tucker, right, hold hands during a wreath-laying ceremony at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Monument on Jan. 20, 2013 in Washington, D.C. hurried delivery, Gregory radiated what author Gerald Nachman described as “positive, cool vibes” on stage.

Gregory “behaved as if he belonged up there, unapologetically, as if his presence was inevitable,” Nachman wrote in his 2003 book “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s.”

“He might have been seething underneath, but on the surface he generally appeared bemused by the hostilities and hypocrisies of the racial divide,” wrote Nachman. “Here or there, a joke might betray a hint of bitterness, like his line about an integrated swimming pool that had a blind lifeguard.”

Wrote ‘nigger’ book

‘Healthy racial jokes’

Health Enterprises Inc.

When he hit in 1961, Gregory once said, “there wasn’t a healthy race joke in America. They were all derogatory to one race or another.” But he “gave the country a new way out — healthy racial jokes.”

And once he got audiences laughing, he found, “I could say anything.”

“This isn’t a revolution of Black against White; this is a revolution of right against wrong,” he told one audience. “And right has never lost.”

His act, however, wasn’t all about race relations.

“I been readin’ so much about cigarettes and cancer, I quit readin’,” he observed on stage.

On the bellicose Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev: “Wouldn’t it be funny if Khrushchev didn’t really hate us, but his interpreter did?”

Gregory became so wellknown that in 1964, E.P. Dutton published his autobiography, the provocatively titled “nigger.”

He dedicated the book to his late mother: “Wherever you are, if ever you hear (that) word … again, remember they are advertising my book.” In all, he wrote five books, one a cookbook.

By then, Gregory’s high-profile involvement in the civil rights movement was overshadowing his comedy career.

His activism took a huge financial toll on Gregory in lost bookings and the cost of travel and other expenses. But as he put it: “I found somethin’ that made me feel better inside than comedy.”

Gregory, who became a vegetarian and gave up drinking and smoking, decided in 1973 to no longer work in venues that sold alcohol.

In 1984, he founded Health Enterprises Inc., a company that distributed weight-loss products, including a powdered diet mix, Dick Gregory’s Slim Safe Bahamian Diet.

In between writing books and speaking on health and social issues with fiery passion on the

lecture circuit, Gregory continued his activism.

Fast for Haiti In 2000, he protested police brutality in New York and Detroit and went to Kentucky to demand the hiring of black school principals.

A decade later, after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, he announced his plan to go on a 30-day fast to maintain public awareness of the need for ongoing Haitian relief.

As Gregory told Ebony magazine at the time: “I am still more inclined to go and march for a young man wrongfully killed in Harlem than do a gig at a university. Once the movement is in you, it’s there. It never leaves.”

Early years Born in St. Louis on Oct. 12, 1932, he was the second of six children. Their father was often absent and finally deserted the family.

His mother, who cleaned the homes of wealthy White people and took care of their children, was a positive influence, telling her own children that “man has two ways out in life — laughing or crying. There’s more hope in laughing.”

Gregory, who shined shoes and did other odd jobs as a child, was a high school track star — he won the mile in 4:28 at an allBlack Missouri state track meet

Met Lillian Smith After his discharge in 1956, Gregory returned to Southern Illinois University. But he soon dropped out and moved to Chicago.

He worked for a time at the post office — “I kept flipping the letters to Mississippi in the foreign slot,” he’d joke — and then at Ford Aircraft before landing a job as a comic-emcee in the lounge of a neighborhood bar on Chicago’s South Side.

In the audience one night was Lillian Smith, a young secretary at the University of Chicago, who became his wife and the mother of their 10 children (an 11th died in infancy). Gregory frequently said his wife was the spiritual core of his family, and his children his most devoted admirers.

‘Turn Me Loose’ In 2016, musician John Legend produced a one-man play on Gregory’s life, “Turn Me Loose.”

Legend said he marveled at how fresh and relevant the comedian’s brand of humor of remained.

“It sounds like he’s aware of what’s happening now even though they were written so long ago,” Legend told The Boston Globe.

The lines were pure Gregory, funny, clever and dipped in sarcasm: “I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.”

In addition to his wife, Gregory is survived by children Ayanna, Yohance, Stephanie, Miss, Christian, Michele, Pamela, Paula, Lynne and Gregory.

Dennis McLellan is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer.

STOJ

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

HEALTH

B3 Not fitting in “We have kids who have access to social media 24/7 that’s providing extra opportunities, especially with teen girls, to make comparisons among themselves,” he said.

“There’s a hypervigilance of how they fit in. They don’t see themselves as like the other girls they see on Facebook and Snapchat. We also need to be worried about boys, as their suicide rates are still higher than girls, and they face increased pressure and scrutiny as well.”

Girls vs. boys

ANTONIO GUILLEM/DREAMSTIME/TNS

A CDC analysis found that 524 females between 15 and 19 died by suicide in 2015 in the U.S.

Rate of suicide among teen girls reaches 40-year high

BY PAIGE CORNWELL SEATTLE TIMES/TNS

In 2015, five girls out of every 100,000 between the ages of 15 and 19 committed suicide in the United States.

The rate is double what it was in 2007, and the highest in 40 years for that age group, according to newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control

(CDC) and Prevention.

The reasons for the rise are complex — researchers point, in part, to teens’ increasing access to social media, an ongoing lack of mental-health resources and a stigma against suicidal behavior — and not entirely understood.

But for suicide-prevention advocates and researchers, the announcement about the 40-year high wasn’t a shock.

“It doesn’t surprise me that it

has come to this spot,” said James Mazza, a University of Washington professor in the College of Education’s School Psychology program.

Troubling rate A CDC analysis found that 524 females between 15 and 19 died by suicide in 2015 in the U.S. The rate for females is still much lower than the suicide rate for males — in 2015, 1,537 males between

15 and 19 committed suicide.

But the rising rate among females is troubling, suicide-prevention advocates said, and signals a need for parents and educators to address the stigma of suicidal thoughts and behavior.

And while he can’t point to one specific reason for suicidal behavior, Mazza said that social media have likely exacerbated the problems teens face, like the pressure to fit in.

More girls tend to have internalized disorders — like anxiety, depression or anorexia — that are difficult for parents or school staff to see if they don’t know the signs.

A study published in the journal Pediatrics last year found that about 17 percent of teen girls have experienced a major depressive episode in the past year, compared with 6 percent of teen boys.

Males have higher rates of ADHD, substance abuse or anti-social behaviors that are easier to spot, so they might have a better chance of receiving help, Mazza said.

And while more teen boys died by suicide, more girls attempt it, noted Aimee Chou, spokeswoman for Forefront, a suicide-prevention center at the UW. Teen boys are more likely to use firearms than females, who tend to use less lethal means, like cutting or taking pills.

Suicidal signs Without more intervention, Mazza thinks the numbers will continue to rise.

“I’ve been writing about this for 20 years,” he said, “and I thought the rates were high 20 years ago.”

Signs of potential suicidal behavior include talking about dying, changes in personality, behavior, sleep patterns or eating habits, and a fear of losing control.

Information, support and referrals are available by calling the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or contacting TeenLink at 866-833-6546.

If a teen is in an emergency, call 911 or go immediately to the nearest hospital emergency room.

Grant to help FAMU nursing students serve rural communities SPECIAL TO THE FLORIDA COURIER

TALLAHASSEE – The Florida A&M University (FAMU) School of Nursing has launched new efforts to increase opportunities to prepare students to work as health care professionals in rural and underserved communities.

The Academic-Practice Partnerships Enhance Advanced Learning (APPEAL) project is supported by a new two-year, $1.3 million grant received by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) this summer.

The goal of APPEAL is to advance the health and life success of Florida communities through the diversification of health professions.

Partnering with sites To accomplish this objective, the nursing school will form academic-practice partnerships with primary care clinical practice sites centered in medically underserved and rural communities to train and increase the number of Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) working in those areas.

APRNs can serve as direct providers of patient care in Florida, offering services such as preventing, diagnosing and treating illnesses, as well as prescriptive capabilities.

Helping nurses, residents RON GARRISON/LEXNGTON HERALD-LEADER/TNS

Marquis, left, and Kelly Marquis Andrew, of Lexington, Ky. kept a watch on the solar eclipse along with several hundred people in Thoroughbred Park in downtown Lexington on Monday.

Signs of eye damage from staring at solar eclipse

BY NASEEM S. MILLER ORLANDO SENTINEL/TNS

Ophthalmologists expect to see a few patients who might have injured to their eyes by staring at the sun during Monday’s solar eclipse.

Called solar retinopathy, the injury occurs when the sun rays damage the retina, a layer of light-sensitive cells in the back of the eye.

Patients may lose their central vision and only be able to see via their side vision. They may develop blurred vision and headache or lose the ability to see colors.

Not uncommon These symptoms may develop immediately or in the hours after staring at the sun.

“Solar retinopathy is not very common,” said Dr. Jaime Membreno, an ophthalmologist at Retina Macula Specialists in Winter Park, in an email. “However I do see and treat many cases that are very similar to solar retinopathy every day.”

Absent a solar eclipse, solar retinopathy is mostly diagnosed among individuals who gaze at the sun during religious rituals, or are exposed to the sun for long periods of time during sunbathing.

There are also case reports of

retinal injury in individuals who have stared at the sun when under the influence of drugs, including marijuana.

See a doctor There’s no specific treatment for solar retinopathy, although doctors can accurately diagnose it with today’s available technology.

Recovery depends on the extent of exposure and the severity of damage. Some studies show that most patients recover their vision, usually within a year, although some long-term damage remains.

See an eye doctor if you think you might have damaged your eye.

Dr. Javier Perez, an ophthalmologist at Orlando Eye Specialists said in an email on Monday that he was “expecting a few patients after the eclipse,” but wasn’t sure how many.

According to Henry C. Talley, Ph.D., dean of the School of Nursing and principal investigator for the grant, the APPEAL project is the perfect opportunity to advance the school’s mission.

“A key component of the School of Nursing’s mission is to educate nurse leaders and scholars, generate new knowledge, and improve health and health care, all in service to the global community,” Talley said.

“The HRSA grant and our new APPEAL project position us to not only train the next generation of nursing professionals on how to serve rural and underserved communities but also allows us to help Dr. Henry eliminate health care disparities for families and inTalley dividuals who deserve the best care available despite their financial status or location.”

Through partnerships, APPEAL will also aim to provide handson training for advanced practice nursing students to prepare them for successful entry into the workforce and improve the competencies of clinical preceptors located in community-based, primary care settings in rural and underserved areas.

Top nursing school Celebrating its 80th anniversary, the FAMU School of Nursing was recently recognized as one of the top nursing schools in the country by leading education research publisher SR Education Group.

The publication recognized the school’s online Master of Nursing program as the No. 16 most affordable program in the country.

SR also highlighted the school’s offering of clinical expertise and experience through promoting local clinical work that prepares students for workplace realities in nursing.

B4

PERSONAL FINANCE

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

STOJ

It’s harder to get rich than it used to be come Dynamics between 1968 to 2013, the report authors were able to track people of low-wealth status to see how they progressed over time. In this case, about 64 percent of households that were in the bottom group in 2003 were still there in 2013. Meanwhile, 1 percent had moved up to the top segment.

The segments The segments were created by taking all of the people in the survey sample and dividing them into five groups.

The top in this case would be the top 20 percent of wealthiest people.

The bottom quintile would be the lowest 20 percent, with three other segments in between.

The Federal Reserve Bank keeps a close eye on wealth mobility because of its dual mandate of full employment and price stability.

“In order to effectively achieve that mandate, Fed economists and analysts are continually seeking to improve our understanding of the economy and how it functions,” Carroll said.

Extraordinary effort Authors of a recent study says families that are able to make big jumps in attaining more wealth appear to be more likely to own some form of a risky asset — stocks, a business, a farm, or ownership in investment real estate properties.

BY TIM GRANT PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE/TNS

Whatever challenges there may have been for Americans three decades ago to move up the wealth ladder pales in comparison to what it takes to make a significant move up today, according to a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

In this land of opportunity, the researchers found that it’s gotten a whole lot harder to have opportunity.

Families have become less likely to change their financial position than would have been the case in the 1980s, and those who do manage to improve their position are less likely to make a significant move up to the highest levels.

Average net worth

credit cards and student loans.

While there is no universally accepted dollar amount of wealth that makes one “wealthy,” the authors use the term in relation to other people in the sample studied.

In that way, the top 20 percent who had an average net worth of about $380,000 and above would be considered wealthy because they are the wealthiest people in the sample.

The lowest 20 percent of people in the country have an average net worth that is not much greater than zero.

Wealth, or net worth, measures the total of one’s assets — cash in the bank, stocks, bonds and real estate — minus debts, including home mortgages, auto loans,

Wealth inequality Families that are able to make big jumps in attaining more wealth appear to be more likely to own some form of a risky asset — stocks, a business, a farm, or ownership in investment real estate properties, said Daniel Carroll and Nicholas Hoffman, authors of the Cleveland Fed study.

“At least relative to how things were 30 years ago, there is a lower chance of some people born in low-wealth circumstances to rise far beyond the station they were born in,” Carroll said.

He said he plans to do more research to better understand the mechanics behind the numbers.

“Why is it harder to move up than it was 30 years ago?” he

said. “I don’t know exactly what is behind this. Some of it is due to rising wealth inequality, which makes the standard for reaching upper wealth quintiles harder.

We hope to learn more about the mechanisms behind the numbers in future research.”

Some factors The mobility of a household is affected by many factors, including the level of education and career choice of those in the household.

There’s also the accumulation of job experience resulting in different earnings as people age.

When individuals pair with or separate from one another, total household income can change considerably.

Using the Panel Study of In-

The authors compare wealth mobility to runners in a race. Inequality is the distance between the runners at the starting gate or at any point in the race. For a runner to catch up and pass someone already ahead of him, it requires an extraordinary effort.

“If you have rising inequality, the threshold those on the lower end of wealth must cross to get to the next bin of wealth has gotten higher,” Hoffman said.

Young households are generally more wealth-poor because they have had little time to save, while older households typically save more, paying down debt and building up assets.

The researchers agree that luck can also play a role in where families end up. An unforeseen illness that leads to expensive medical bills could cause a downward movement. Winning the lottery or receiving a large inheritance from a parent could move a family several tiers up the ladder.

Johnson & Johnson slapped with $417 million verdict over cancer link to baby powder

BY RICHARD WINTON LOS ANGELES TIMES/TNS

A Los Angeles jury issued a $417 million verdict Monday against Johnson & Johnson, finding the company liable for failing to warn a 63-year-old woman diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer about the risks of using its talcum products.

The verdict marks the largest award yet in a number of suits claiming that the company’s talc powder causes ovarian cancer.

More than 300 lawsuits are pending in California and more than 4,500 claims in the rest of the country, alleging that the health care giant ignored studies linking its Johnson’s Baby Powder and Shower to Shower products to cancer.

Used for decades The plaintiff, Eva Echeverria, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2007. A surgeon removed a softball-sized tumor, but Echeverria is now near death and was unable to attend the trial, one of her attorneys said.

In a video-recorded deposition played for the jury, she testi-

fied she used the Johnson’s Baby Powder from age 11 until 2016, when she saw a news story about a woman with ovarian cancer who had also used the product.

The talc is one of the company’s best-known products, marketed at one point with the jingle, “A sprinkle a day helps keep the odor away.”

Connection found Echeverria testified that if Johnson & Johnson, which earned a profit of $16.5 billion last year, had put a warning on the product, she would have stopped using it.

After two days of deliberating, jurors awarded Echeverria $70 million in compensatory damages and $347 million in punitive damages.

The jury panel found there was a connection between her ovarian cancer and the baby powder.

“We are grateful for the jury’s verdict on this matter and that Eva Echeverria was able to have her day in court,” said Mark Robinson, one of her attorneys, who accused Johnson & Johnson of “covering up the truth for so many years.”

4 keys to a successful side hustle FAMILY FEATURES

Deciding to join the leagues of entrepreneurs launching a parttime small business can be a major personal and professional step.

It’s a way to stretch your creative muscles, build new skills, earn extra income from home and potentially unlock additional possibilities for you and your family in the future. It’s also a significant investment of your time and talents.

Most part-time small business owners get started because they want extra income, low-risk wages, flexibility and the opportuni-

ty to contribute to the common good. However, these benefits are not enjoyed evenly across the many different types of businesses you may be considering.

Learn to ask smarter questions about these highly sought-after benefits to make sure you find the right fit for you and your family.

Extra income Many people seek a side job with a specific, money-oriented goal in mind. That can be increasing the monthly household income, saving toward a down payment for a new home or go-

Thousands of claims have been filed in the U.S. alleging that Johnson & Johnson ignored studies linking its products to cancer.

Company will appeal Johnson & Johnson immediately announced it would seek to overturn the verdict.

“We will appeal today’s verdict

ing on a vacation.

Look for a side gig that solves daily problems around necessities like cooking or eating to ensure your services are in-demand year-round.

Low-risk wages The ideal side job is easy to start without heavy investment or training. An independent consultant business, for example, can provide low start-up costs, easy ways to join and the built-in appeal of an already established brand, so you can get to earning extra income faster.

Before jumping on board, take time to learn the start-up costs associated with any part-time gig and how long it will take you to

because we are guided by the science, which supports the safety of Johnson’s Baby Powder,” the company said in a statement.

During the trial, the company’s lawyers argued that various sci-

entific studies as well as federal agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, had not found that talc products are carcinogenic.

learn the skills to recoup your investment.

“Starting a business can be a very expensive thing,” Pampered Chef consultant Rachel Hanson said. “I was looking for something that was affordable and gave me everything I needed to get started.”

done at any time – or even from the comfort of your own home.

Flexibility and family time Being your own boss allows you to decide when you will work and when you won’t, but some side gigs require work during “high-traffic” times that can detract from the freedom you are seeking.

Be sure to pick a side hustle that fits your schedule and can be

Work with purpose If you get your drive from a powerful sense of purpose, like improving people’s health or bringing families together, a side job that makes an impact is likely to give you the job satisfaction you need to succeed long-term.

There are many franchise and direct-sales businesses that have strong charitable partnerships so you can give back locally while you earn extra cash. Beyond charitable work, look for roles where you are teaching important skills or solving common problems for your customers, beyond simply selling products.

STOJ

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

Meet some of

FLORIDA’S

finest

FINEST & ENTERTAINMENT

B5

Think you’re one of Florida’s Finest?

E-mail your high-resolution (200 dpi) digital photo in casual wear or bathing suit taken in front of a plain background with few distractions, to news@flcourier. com with a short biography of yourself and your contact information. (No nude/ glamour/ fashion photography, please!) In order to be considered, you must be at least 18 years of age. Acceptance of the photographs submitted is in the sole and absolute discretion of Florida Courier editors. We reserve the right to retain your photograph even if it is not published. If you are selected, you will be contacted by e-mail and further instructions will be given.

CHARLES W. CHERRY II / FLORIDA COURIER

Thousands of Caribbean culture lovers converge on South Florida every year on the Columbus Day weekend to attend the annual Miami Broward Carnival, a series of concerts, pageants, parades, and competitions. On Carnival Day, “mas” (masquerade) bands of thousands of revelers dance and march behind 18-wheel tractor-trailer trucks with booming sound systems from morning until nightfall while competing for honors. Here are some of the “Finest” we’ve seen over the years.

Go to www.miamibrowardcarnival.com for information on this year’s Carnival.

ure who was herself a Grammywinning gospel singer.

Though singing in the church was important to the young girl, her two older brothers admit early drug use, and the implication is that she became involved as well.

Not ‘too black’ Houston met Crawford, who was to become her closest friend, confidant and protector, while they were both in high school.

The film inconclusively speculates that they might have been lovers as well, but what everyone agrees on is that the relationship with Crawford was a safe place Houston could count on.

The singer was signed to an Arista recording contract by Davis when she was but 19, young enough to be moldable by him into a crossover pop artist who was not allowed to “sound too black,” according to Arista executives.

‘Soul Train’ boos

LAFAYETTE FILMS/PASSION PICTURES/SHOWTIME

Whitney: “Can I Be Me?’’ is a new documentary about Whitney Houston now airing on Showtime.

Those who worked with singer shed light on ‘Whitney’

BY KENNETH TURAN LOS ANGELES TIMES/TNS

The life and too-early death of singer Whitney Houston was a train wreck that lots of people say they saw coming but that no one was able to stop.

Dead at age 48 in her Beverly Hilton hotel room, Houston was as celebrated as she was gifted, and as clips from the documentary “Whitney: Can I Be Me?” demonstrate, her musical abilities were extraordinary. As more than one person says, her voice sounded like it came directly from God. Co-directed by Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal and playing a qualifying theatrical run before airing on Showtime, “Whitney’s” story makes for strong and compelling viewing even though it has something of a cobbled together feel to it.

MOVIE REVIEW Never-seen footage Houston’s trajectory has uncanny echoes of the tragedy of Amy Winehouse, but “Whitney” is not the seamless piece of work Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning “Amy” was.

Aside from stock and home movie footage, this film is divided between on-camera interviews conducted by veteran documentarian Bloomfield (“Tales of the Grim Sleeper,” “Biggie and Tupac” plus many others) and never-before-seen footage of Houston’s legendary 1999 European tour by music video veteran and co-director Dolezal.

That footage has some extraordinary performance moments, including Houston’s heartbreaking rendition of “I Will Always

Love You” from the tour’s Frankfurt stop that opens the film and lifts you off your feet.

Emotional interviews Broomfield, for his part, was hampered by the fact that he was not able to interview key people in Houston’s life, including ex-husband Bobby Brown, her closest friend Robyn Crawford, and Clive Davis, the Svengali who began her career. So he shrewdly chose to go another route.

The director has elicited candid, emotional interviews with those who worked with Houston, including members of her band and her personal retinue. (David Roberts, her longtime personal security and the model for Kevin Costner’s character in Houston’s breakout film “The Bodyguard,” is especially frank.)

The bad times Though stories of extensive drug use and sexual tensions can make the film feel exploitative at times, the gap between Houston’s enormous talent and her truncated life means that more than anything else the tale related here will simply make you sad.

“Whitney actually died from a broken heart,” one of her band members says, and that seems like it could actually be true.

Broomfield’s take, as his film’s plaintive title indicates, is that managing the ever-increasing gap between who the singer was and who the people who made money off her — including her family — wanted her to be, became too much for her to handle, a situation drug use did nothing to improve.

Taught by Mom Though mainstream America perceived her as a princess, Houston was born in Newark, N.J., and, more than one interviewee says, “came from the hood.”

Born into a musical family (Dionne Warwick was her cousin), Houston was taught to sing by her mother Cissy, a domineering fig-

From a commercial point of view, that ploy was successful, leading to more consecutive No. 1 hits than the Beatles, but there was backlash in the Black community, which culminated in Houston being booed at the 1989 “Soul Train’’ awards show.

“That moment was devastating,” says saxophonist Kirk Whalum. “I don’t think she ever recovered. When the boxes are ticked on why she perished, that was a big one.”

That “Soul Train’’ evening was also when Houston met Bobby Brown, a singer with a bad-boy image. Their connection to each other was undeniable — they married and had a daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, who died in 2015 of “undetermined” causes — but the film says he did not help in the substance abuse area.

Oil and water More critically, as impromptu footage of them together makes clear, Brown and Crawford were oil and water.

Crawford was out of the picture by 2000, and that crucial support was missed as the marriage crumbled and the drug problem went unsolved.

As with Winehouse, despite all the money she had made for so many people, no one around her was able to step in and make a difference. A familiar story, perhaps, but always a tragic one.

Check Showtime’s schedule for airtimes of the documentary.

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FOOD

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

S

FAMILY FEATURES

Nutritious, well-rounded meals are essential for growth and proper brain development. A complete midday meal also helps boost mental and physical power so kids can keep on learning until the afternoon bell rings.

It’s not always easy to find new and appealing ideas to fuel kids’ bodies and minds as they head back to school, but programs for families and educators such as the Power Your Lunchbox Pledge can help.

“Families are looking for ways to start the year on the right foot and the Power Your Lunchbox Pledge offers everything they need in one spot,” said Trish James, vice president of Produce for Kids. “Families want to know their kids are receiving the right brain food to get them through the day. Our registered dietitian-approved meal inspiration, tips and ideas provide the foundation families need for success.”

Helps Feeding America

Back-to-school power for body and mind BANANA SUSHI ROLLS 1 large (8-inch) whole-wheat tortilla 3 tablespoons peanut butter, divided 1 banana, peeled 1 strawberry, sliced 1/2 kiwi, sliced 1 tablespoon shredded coconut

Lay tortilla on flat surface.

Spread with half of peanut butter.

Place banana on one end of tortilla and roll up. Cut into even slices and place strawberries and kiwi slices on top.

Microwave remaining peanut butter on high 30 seconds, or until melted, and drizzle over banana sushi. Top with shredded coconut.

BROWN BEAR BENTO BOX 1 tablespoon soy butter 3 graham cracker squares 3 banana slices 9 blueberries Variety of colorful fruit, chopped Spread soy butter on graham crackers. Arrange banana slices

and blueberries to create eyes and noses to resemble bear faces. In another container, add colorful fruit, such as raspberries, cantaloupe, pineapple, honeydew, blueberries and blackberries, to create a rainbow fruit salad.

Suggested Side: 1 tablespoon ranch dressing and three mini sweet peppers, sliced into strips.

Over $5.2 million donated by our customers and associates in 2017 Thank you to those who donated in our stores this spring to help save and improve children’s lives. publix.com/CMNH

In addition to kid-tested, lunchbox-friendly recipe ideas, the program provides resources and lesson plans for educators who want to create activities to inspire healthy eating in the classroom.

This year’s program includes a partnership with The World of Eric Carle, allowing students to win copies of his popular collection of children’s books.

Additionally, every online pledge results in a $1 donation to Feeding America programs that support families and children.

Look for recipes, tips and ideas on Instagram and Twitter using #PowerYourLunchbox, and learn more about the program at poweryourlunchbox.com.

B6

FOOD

AUGUST 25 – AUGUST 31, 2017

TOJ

FAMILY FEATURES

Nutritious, well-rounded meals are essential for growth and proper brain development. A complete midday meal also helps boost mental and physical power so kids can keep on learning until the afternoon bell rings.

It’s not always easy to find new and appealing ideas to fuel kids’ bodies and minds as they head back to school, but programs for families and educators such as the Power Your Lunchbox Pledge can help.

“Families are looking for ways to start the year on the right foot and the Power Your Lunchbox Pledge offers everything they need in one spot,” said Trish James, vice president of Produce for Kids. “Families want to know their kids are receiving the right brain food to get them through the day. Our registered dietitian-approved meal inspiration, tips and ideas provide the foundation families need for success.”

Helps Feeding America

Back-to-school power for body and mind BANANA SUSHI ROLLS 1 large (8-inch) whole-wheat tortilla 3 tablespoons peanut butter, divided 1 banana, peeled 1 strawberry, sliced 1/2 kiwi, sliced 1 tablespoon shredded coconut

Lay tortilla on flat surface.

Spread with half of peanut butter.

Place banana on one end of tortilla and roll up. Cut into even slices and place strawberries and kiwi slices on top.

Microwave remaining peanut butter on high 30 seconds, or until melted, and drizzle over banana sushi. Top with shredded coconut.

BROWN BEAR BENTO BOX 1 tablespoon soy butter 3 graham cracker squares 3 banana slices 9 blueberries Variety of colorful fruit, chopped Spread soy butter on graham crackers. Arrange banana slices

and blueberries to create eyes and noses to resemble bear faces. In another container, add colorful fruit, such as raspberries, cantaloupe, pineapple, honeydew, blueberries and blackberries, to create a rainbow fruit salad.

Suggested Side: 1 tablespoon ranch dressing and three mini sweet peppers, sliced into strips.

In addition to kid-tested, lunchbox-friendly recipe ideas, the program provides resources and lesson plans for educators who want to create activities to inspire healthy eating in the classroom.

This year’s program includes a partnership with The World of Eric Carle, allowing students to win copies of his popular collection of children’s books.

Additionally, every online pledge results in a $1 donation to Feeding America programs that support families and children.

Look for recipes, tips and ideas on Instagram and Twitter using #PowerYourLunchbox, and learn more about the program at poweryourlunchbox.com.

How to fuel kids’ day with milk FAMILY FEATURES

As kids head back to school, it’s a good time to refocus on nutritious food and beverage choices to make sure kids are properly fueled and ready to learn. Making the best choices for her family is every mom’s priority, but it can be confusing to navigate all the options available.

For example, many celebrity websites, diet books, blogs and popular social media feeds make it appear trendy to ditch dairy.

Yet experts say going dairy-free has significant downfalls, especially for kids and young adults.

A survey from the National Osteoporosis Foundation (NOF) found six in 10 moms have tried restricting their dairy intake, and fewer moms encourage their kids to drink milk today compared to how many were encouraged to drink milk themselves as children – in fact, some are even restricting their children’s intake of dairy.

Importance of milk It can be hard to get enough nutrients without milk in your diet. Drinking dairy milk dur-

RAINBOW UNICORN SMOOTHIE 1 1/2 cups low-fat or fat-free milk, plus additional (optional) 1/2 cup low-fat vanilla yogurt 2 cups (about 10 large) frozen strawberries 1 cup frozen blueberries 1 cup frozen mango chunks Optional toppings: 6 tablespoons whipped cream 4 teaspoons sprinkles horn candles, wicks trimmed Blend milk, yogurt and fruit until smooth, adding additional milk or water to thin, if needed.

Divide smoothie into four glasses and, if desired, top each with whipped cream, sprinkles and horn candles.

Nutritional information per serving: 120 calories; 1 g fat; 5 mg cholesterol; 5 g protein; 25 g carbohydrates; 3 g fiber; 60 mg sodium; 175 mg calcium (20 percent of daily value). Nutrition figures based on using fat-free milk.

VANILLA CINNAMON MILK 8 ounces milk ½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon 2 teaspoons honey In a glass, combine milk with vanilla extract, ground cinnamon and honey. Stir until well mixed.

Nutritional information per serving: 130 calories; 5 mg cholesterol; 8 g protein; 24 g carbohydrates; 105 mg sodium; 308 mg calcium (30 percent of daily value).

ing childhood through early adulthood is important to help achieve maximum bone strength. It’s also important to drink milk as an adult to help maintain bone strength and density.

Most dairy alternatives don’t have the same nutrients as dairy milk and kids may not eat enough kale, spinach or sardines to replace the calcium in milk.

However, many moms know how important milk is for their kids. According to the NOF survey, more than 80 percent of moms know milk is nutrientrich. In fact, milk is the top food source for three of the four nutrients of concern identified by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans: calcium, vitamin D and potassium.

Incorporating farm-fresh milk into your diet can be fun for the whole family. Try making your own flavored milk or smoothie at home with these recipes for Vanilla Cinnamon Milk or a Rainbow Unicorn Smoothie.