Florida Courier - August 26, 2016

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AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

VOLUME 24 NO. 35

GEORGE E. CURRY, 1947-2016

THE FINAL WORD IS WRITTEN Black Press legend George E. Curry, a chronicler and critic of the modern Black American experience, dies suddenly at 69.

Editor’s note – read two of George Curry’s most relevant columns on Pages A2 and A4.

BY THE FLORIDA COURIER STAFF

TACOMA PARK, MD. – The Black Press lost one of its most celebrated warriors when George E. Curry, veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Pub-

lishers Association (NNPA) News Wire, died from an apparent heart attack on Saturday, Aug. 20. Curry was 69.

He most recently was editor and publisher of EmergeNewsOnline.com, an African-American-oriented news website and monthly digital magazine that provides culturally-sensitive news, information and perspectives.

Through his company, George Curry Media, he provided a weekly column to media outlets around the country as well as columns and articles written by prominent Black civil rights activists.

The Florida Courier and its sister newspaper, the Daytona Times, and many Black-owned newspapers FREDDIE ALLEN/AMG/NNPA published Curry’s well-re- Veteran journalist George Curry speaks during Black Press Week in Washington, See CURRY, Page A2

D.C., in 2014.

Shock and sadness Black media, journalists react to Curry’s death

BY THE FLORIDA COURIER STAFF

Rumors of George Curry’s sudden death circulated heavily in journalistic circles on Aug. 20, a Saturday night.

“I was at dinner with my family when I got a text that ‘George Curry passed,’” said Florida Courier Publisher Charles W. Cherry II. “My first instinct was to not believe it without confirmation, so we started making phone calls and doing online and social media research.

“I even called George’s cell phone and left a message for him, paraphrasing author Mark Twain – ‘I hope reports of your death are greatly exaggerated’ – and hoping for a call back. Of course, it never came.”

‘Tragic loss’ CHARLES W. CHERRY II / FLORIDA COURIER

Clash in Chicago

Journalist George Curry was in constant demand as a moderator, speaker and master of ceremonies. During the 2011 National Newspaper Publishers Association national convention in Chicago, he presided over a fiery but respectful debate between the Rev. Al Sharpton and Dr. Cornel West about the presidential legacy of Barack Obama. Sharpton is scheduled to eulogize Curry at Curry’s homegoing service in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

SNAPSHOTS

Details released about gator attack at Disney resort Educators take sides in Orlando Senate race

HEALTH | B3

The mental health crisis in Flint

TALLAHASSEE – The future of Florida A&M University President Elmira Mangum remained in limbo Wednesday after the school’s board of trustees narrowly rejected a oneyear extension of her contract.

Following a trustees’ decision in June to take no action on Mangum’s three-year contract, which is scheduled to expire April 1, the board renewed Dr. Elmira its debate WednesMangum day after an annual evaluation that was critical of her leadership.

Goals not met

NATION | A6

Exonerations in U.S. at record high

ALSO INSIDE

See REACTION, Page A2

Contract extension rejected for FAMU president

BY LLOYD DUNKELBERGER THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

FLORIDA | A3

Curry’s death was confirmed by Dr. Bernard Lafayette, chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) shortly before midnight.

“This is a tragic loss to the movement because George Curry was a journalist who paid special attention to civil rights because he lived it and loved it,” Lafayette said through his spokesman Maynard Eaton, SCLC national communications director.

A solid majority of the 13-member board found the president did not meet expectations on four of the 11 goals, including her relationship with trustees, during the 201516 academic year.

David Lawrence, a trustee and former Miami Herald publisher, said his “greatest concern” was in

Mangum’s ability to build successful relationships with various university constituencies as well as with lawmakers, the governor and major financial contributors.

“I think that she cannot succeed in any way that is good enough unless the matter of relationships is tackled and overcome,” Lawrence said.

Still at odds Kelvin Lawson, a Jacksonville businessman and the FAMU board chairman, echoed a similar theme, saying the trustees and Mangum were at odds over their expectations of a “shared governance” of the university between the president and the trustees.

Lawson said Mangum seemed to favor a “more closed” approach, while the trustees preferred more openness, including being well-informed on key leadership decisions “I think that is what the board is yearning for, that level of openness and transparency,” Lawson said.

Defends herself Mangum is the first woman to lead FAMU on a permanent basis in the university’s 129-year history.

She said she believed she had met or exceeded all the evaluation goals and firmly defended her presidency, noting some of her key achievements included improving FAMU enough to qualify for more than $25 million in performance funding from the state. The funding rewards universities that achieve certain standards, including graduation rates and job placement.

Mangum, who was appointed in 2014, also said there was a “lack of clarity” on many of the evaluation goals, which included items like “organizational management.”

“What does success look like and how do the members of the board define it?” Mangum asked, adding she had expected more discussion between herself and the evaluators before the report was finalized.

‘In shock’ But Mangum’s comments drew a strong rebuttal from a number of trustees, who noted the evaluation goals were very similar to last year’s evaluation and the process has been underway for months.

Matthew Carter, a trustee and former member of the state Public Service Commission, said if Mangum had issues with the evaluation

process, they should have been raised much earlier. “I’m just kind of in shock really,” he said.

The trustees also debated how to resolve the presidency issue going forward, noting that if nothing is done the university will be without a president on April 1.

Extension proposed Harold Mills, a trustee and Orlando businessman, proposed offering Mangum a one-year contract extension, while requiring Mangum to work with an “executive coach” during the year.

Carter opposed the extension.

“What you’re saying is let’s put us in the same place next year as we are now,” he said. “That’s crazy.”

Robert Woody, a trustee and former deputy secretary at the state Department of Juvenile Justice, also opposed the extension. “This relationship is not working … I haven’t changed my opinion,” he said.

The one-year extension failed in a 7-5 vote.

If her contract expires on April 1, Mangum will be eligible for a 12-month sabbatical and then join the FAMU faculty as a tenured professor earning 90 percent of her current $425,000 salary.

COMMENTARY: JENNIFER CARROLL: HOW WILL THE CANDIDATES’ TAX PLANS AFFECT YOU? | A4 COMMENTARY: BRUCE A. DIXON: WHY THE GREEN PARTY INSTEAD OF THE DEMOCRATS? | A5

FOCUS

A2

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

I had a heart attack Editor’s note: Journalist George Curry wrote this article in March 2015. He subsequently experienced a second heart attack that was fatal approximately 1½ years after this article was written.

Nothing was more startling than when a cardiologist looked me directly in the eyes and said matter-of-factly: “It looks like you had a heart attack.”

I was dumbfounded. When?

Where? How much damage was done? Why didn’t I know it?

It certainly didn’t feel like I had suffered a heart attack.

Reporting on Selma I had just covered and participated in the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala. The ceremonies had special significance to me because as a senior at Druid High School in Tuscaloosa, I had participated in the last day of the march in Montgomery, where I saw James Baldwin and Harry Belafonte for the first time.

Ann and I arrived a day early, had dinner with Susan Gandy, the youngest of my three sisters, who had driven over to Montgomery from Tuskegee with her husband, Iverson, Jr., and my niece, Rachel.

GEORGE E. CURRY GEORGE CURRY MEDIA

A leisurely trip In addition to covering the president’s speech Saturday, I had received a Freedom Flame Award that night and on Sunday morning was one of the speakers at the Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast. I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday and completed my writing and editing for the NNPA News Service on Monday.

We stopped in Buford, Ga., Tuesday enroute back to Washington, D.C. to visit Ann’s son, Derek Ragland; his wife, April, and our grandkids, Austin, 5, and Autumn 1.

Slight pain On Wednesday night, I felt a slight pain in my chest, but dismissed it as indigestion. It continued Thursday night. When the pain persisted Friday night, Ann insisted on taking me to the hospital and I acquiesced.

We ended up at Emory Johns Creek Hospital. To Ann’s disbelief, I grabbed my iPad mini, a book, my charger, and a notebook as we headed out of the door. I know how long the wait can be in emergency rooms and did not want to be without reading material if I became trapped in the waiting lounge.

But once my symptoms were shared with the intake nurses, I was whizzed through the paperwork and placed in a room to wait for a doctor, to be administered an EKG and, of course, give blood.

Overnight observation “We’re going to keep you overnight to see what’s happening,” the attending physician told me.

From the way he said “keep me,” I deduced that they were not keeping me around just to get to know me better. Something was amiss and I wasn’t sure what it was.

I was wheeled into a private room in the Intensive Care Unit, where I was closely monitored around the clock, had blood extracted – usually at ungodly hours – and hooked up to a series of instruments. A hospital is not place to get sleep; it’s the only place in the world where they

REACTION Curry’s connection to the SCLC was through his longtime childhood friend, confidant and ally in civil rights, Dr. Charles Steele, SCLC president. Lafayette said Dr. Steele was initially too distraught to make the announcement himself and was also awaiting notification of Curry’s immediate family.

Steele and Curry grew up together in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where Curry bloomed as a civil rights and sports writer as Steele grew into a politician and civil rights leader.

FLORIDA COURIER

In March 2011, Florida Courier and Daytona Times Publisher Charles W. Cherry II and journalist George Curry take time for a photo after the National Newspaper Publishers Association luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

‘Time, energy, wisdom’ “George’s uncompromising journalistic leadership delivered on Emerge (magazine’s) promise to deliver edgy, hard-hitting, intellectual, well-written and thoroughly researched content that attracted national attention and left an indelible mark on the lives of many,” Rolark Barnes said.

“George provided so much of

his time, energy, wisdom and incredible journalistic genius to the Black Press. His work will stand as a lasting legacy of journalistic excellence and integrity of which all of us in the Black Press and the journalism industry at large can feel extremely proud.”

Black Press ‘icon’ Freddie Allen, the managing

CURRY

Routine surgery The surgery itself was not as dramatic as the bypass, which required the heart to be stopped temporarily. This time, the cardiologist made an incision in my groin, placed a stent over a balloon catheter and slid it into the heart muscle to improve blood flow. I was awake, but did not feel any pain.

From there, the ICU nurses – especially Glenn, Rene, KayLee and Shig – took fantastic care of me. They could not have provid-

Curry was a consummate journalist with integrity as his mantra, said Dorothy R. Leavell, publisher of the Crusader newspapers in Chicago and Gary, Indiana.

“We shall miss this voice of reason and thought-provoking columns full of researched facts. It was just the week of August 13th that George wrote a column titled, ‘Even Funerals Are Not Family Reunions Anymore.’ He used his family as an example of the loss of closeness that he had enjoyed during his childhood and early adult life and bemoaned the fact that at his cousin Charlene’s funeral the week before that closeness was no longer there,” Leavell said.

“What was ironic is that he pledged that he would try to get

Didn’t back down

from A1

searched commentaries and columns for decades.

His last column titled, “Baltimore Cops Routinely Violate Rights of Blacks,” focused on the Department of Justice’s stinging assessment of the Baltimore Police Department in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody.

Curry’s storied career includes his role as editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Emerge magazine from 1993 to 2000. The magazine won more than 40 journalism awards under Curry’s leadership.

From April 2012 to October 2015, he served as editor of the National Newspaper Publishers Association’s NNPA News Service, a consortium of more than 200 Black Press members around the country.

His work at the NNPA has ranged from being inside the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases to traveling to Doha, Qatar, to report on America’s war with Iraq.

As a journalist, Curry’s work took him to countries all over the world, including Egypt, England, France, Italy, China, Germany, Malaysia, Thailand, Cuba, Brazil, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, Canada, and Austria.

In August 2012, he was part of the official U.S. delegation and a

At the age of 50, I had a triple bypass. I had played quarterback at Druid High and Knoxville College and neither drank – not even wine – smoked, nor used illicit drugs.

Yet, an athletic past and clean living were not sufficient. I was the son of the South, and I had grown up in a family where our grease was cooked in grease.

Now, 18 years later, I was told that of the three bypassed arteries, one was completely blocked, one was 97 percent blocked, and one was functioning fine.

‘Missed already’

‘Fearless scholar’

Award-winning career

Previous blockage

editor of the NNPA News Wire, called Curry an icon in the Black Press and said that his legacy of mentoring young journalists will bear fruit for many years to come.

Allen and Curry were part of a Black media delegation that worked with the Black AIDS Institute to cover the 2016 International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa.

“George taught me what it meant to be a professional journalist and also about the importance of working in the Black Press,” Allen said. “His writing and insight on critical issues affecting the Black community will be sorely missed. I’m thankful for the time we spent together in Durban.”

from A1

“Black America, and in fact millions of African people all over the world, had come to know George Curry as a fearless scholar and writer who used his pen and wit to aggressively advance the cause of freedom, justice and equality for Black people and for the whole of humanity,” said NNPA President Dr. Benjamin Chavis.

It’s hard to believe that Curry, who led the NNPA as editor-inchief of its news wire from 2003 to 2007 and then from 2012 to 2015, has died, said Washington Informer Publisher and NNPA Chair Denise Rolark Barnes, who called Curry a giant in the journalism profession.

wake you up to give you a sleeping pill.

I was told around midnight that at 7 a.m. Saturday, a stent would be inserted into my heart to unblock a clogged artery.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was a regular target of criticism during George Curry’s tenure as editor of the now-defunct Emerge magazine. Curry relaunched Emerge as an online news site and was raising money for it when he died. presenter at the U.S.-Brazil seminar on educational equity in Brasilia, Brazil. Just last month, he attended and reported on the AIDS International Conference in Durban, South Africa.

Alabama native George Edward Curry was born on Feb. 23, 1947, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His mother worked as a domestic and his father was a mechanic.

In 1966, Curry moved to New York, where he worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for a year. He earned his bachelor of arts degree in history from Knoxville College in 1970.

At Knoxville, he was editor of the school paper, quarterback and co-captain of the football team, a student member of the school’s board of trustees, and attended Harvard and Yale on sum-

mer history scholarships.

‘Mainstream’ experience He began his journalism career as a reporter for Sports Illustrated magazine in 1970, the second African-American hired by the publication. He then worked as a beat reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch until 1983.

In 1977, he founded the St. Louis Minority Journalism Workshop, a training program for aspiring high school journalists. Seven years later, he became founding director of the Washington Association of Black Journalists’ annual high school journalism workshop.

Curry also worked for the Chicago Tribune as a Washington correspondent, covering political stories such as Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.

From 1989 until 1993, Curry was the New York bureau chief of the Tribune.

“George was part of the first wave of African-American journalists to finally be allowed to cover a presidential campaign for the so-called mainstream press,” Jackson told the Chicago SunTimes newspaper.

“His dispatches did not sit well with some of his white colleagues.

They challenged his objectivity and integrity. But George did not back down. He helped pave the way for other journalists of color to do their jobs without questions and doubts.”

Curry then became editor-inchief of Emerge magazine until it folded in 2003. While serving as editor of Emerge, Curry was elected president of the American Society of Magazine Editors, the first African-American to hold the association’s top office.

Impact on Clinton He was most proud of his fouryear campaign to win the release of Kemba Smith, a 22-year-old woman who was given a mandatory sentence of 24 ½ years in prison for her minor role in a drug ring.

In May 1996, Emerge published a cover story titled “Kemba’s Nightmare.” President Clinton pardoned Smith in December 2000, marking the end of her nightmare.

His name is as prominent among civil rights circles as among journalists. He traveled with Jackson and appeared weekly to do commentary on the radio show of the Rev. Al Sharpton, “Keepin’ It Real.”

He also appeared on CBS Evening News, ABC’s World News

ed better care, even if that meant waking me constantly.

Moving forward I had a follow-up visit and a stress test with Dr. Jigishu Dhabuwala at the North Atlanta Heart and Vascular Clinic before being released to the care of Dr. Boisey O. Barnes, my regular cardiologist in Washington.

I spoke with Dr. Barnes during this period and before I returned home, he had already discussed getting me into a heart rehabilitation program and enrolling me in a Harvard study to prevent second heart attacks.

Pay attention!

After writing about my bypass 18 years ago, Bill Pickard, a Detroit businessman, said I had probably saved his life because he took some immediate steps to improve his health after reading about my challenge in Emerge magazine.

At the urging of “Uncle Mike” Fauvelle of Setauket, N.Y., I am writing about my second close call with death, hoping that it, too, will prompt you to not only pay closer attention to your health, but be aware of the small signs of trouble and do something about it immediately if you sense something is awry.

his family back together…I’m sure George meant to keep that pledge and perhaps the closeness of his family will become a reality, but at a large cost,” said Leavell, adding that she hoped his family will reunite at his funeral.

“We miss you already, George.”

CBC, Clinton react The news of Curry’s death not only reverberated throughout Black media. The loss was also felt in the halls of government.

“Curry was a giant in journalism and he stood on the frontlines of the Civil Rights era and used his voice to tell our stories when others would not,” CBC Chairman G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), said in a statement. “The CBC offers our sympathies and condolences to his friends and family, his readers from around the country, and to the countless number of individuals he mentored in the art of reporting and journalistic writing until his untimely death.”

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed her thoughts about Curry, whom she called a friend.

“With quality reporting, creativity, and skillful persuasion he influenced countless people, including me, to think beyond their narrow experience and expand their understanding. George may be gone, but he will not be forgotten,” Clinton said in a statement.

Stacy M. Brown of the NNPA News Wire contributed to this report.

Tonight, The Today Show, 20/20, Good Morning America, CNN, CSPAN, BET, Fox Network News, MSNBC, and ESPN.

Recognized and appreciated In 2000, the University of Missouri presented Curry with its Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, the same honor it had earlier bestowed on such luminaries as Joseph Pulitzer, Walter Cronkite, John H. Johnson, and Winston Churchill. In 2003, the National Association of Black Journalists named Curry Journalist of the Year.

In January 2016, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, the nation’s leading advocate for minority advancement in communications.

Curry is also the author of “Jake Gaither: America’s Most Famous Black Coach” and editor of “The Affirmative Action Debate” and “The Best of Emerge Magazine.”

He was editor of the National Urban League’s 2006 State of Black America report.

When he died, he was raising money to fully fund EmergeNewsOnline.com, the digital version of the former paper magazine.

Curry’s homegoing service is set for Aug. 27 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Information from the Trice Edney News Wire and NNPA News Wire contributor Stacy M. Brown was used to prepare this report.

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

FLORIDA

A3 and saw Matt Graves with blood “all over the right side of his face and right hand,” the report states.

Gator sighting reported The lifeguard said he then saw the victim and the gator in the water 15 to 25 feet from shore. The gator started splashing around, the lifeguard told deputies, and then both went under as the gator dragged the boy farther into the lagoon.

After searching for nearly 16 hours, crews found Lane’s body intact not far from the shore where the alligator grabbed him, the report states. A medical examiner determined he had a traumatic neck injury and drowned.

At least two people reported to Disney workers seeing an alligator in the water before the attack.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers captured, examined and killed six alligators during the search for Lane’s body.

Walls, warnings RED HUBER/ORLANDO SENTINEL/TNS

A Disney World monorail passes overhead near the command post of Florida Fish and Wildlife and Orange County Sheriffs Marine Units as they search for Lane Graves on June 15 after the boy was grabbed by an alligator at Grand Floridian Resort at Disney World.

New details released on gator attack at Disney resort

BY STEPHANIE ALLEN ORLANDO SENTINEL/TNS

ORLANDO – Lane Graves bent over to scoop wet sand into his small plastic bucket when the alligator struck.

The 2-year-old wanted to build a sandcastle on the beach at Disney’s Grand

Floridian Resort & Spa after stormy weather canceled a scheduled outdoor movie.

His father, who was standing nearby with his wife and 4-year-old daughter, heard a splash and turned to see the alligator grab Lane’s head, according to Orange County Sheriff’s Office reports released Monday.

Matt Graves jumped into the water, pulling on the gator’s snout in an unsuccessful attempt to free his son from its grip.

Seconds later, the gator pulled Lane underwater and both disappeared into the Seven Seas Lagoon, the report states.

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Distraught family, guests Detectives recently completed their investigation into the June 14 attack, ruling Lane’s death an accident. The reports released Monday detail the terror the Nebraska family experienced and the horror hotel guests witnessed as

crews frantically tried to save the boy.

At least one witness lost consciousness after the attack, and deputies offered counseling services to another who remained distraught more than a day later, according to the report.

Matt Graves also went to Florida Hospital Celebration Health at the recommendation of emergency medical crews, who found he had multiple cuts on his hand from the alligator’s teeth and scratches on his foot, the report states.

A lifeguard told deputies he heard screaming

Educators take sides in Orlando Senate race In a Democratic primary battle for an Orlando-area Senate seat, Florida’s largest teachers’ union is backing state Rep. Randolph Bracy, while school-choice supporters have contributed to former Sen. Gary Siplin, campaign-finance reports show.

The Florida Education Association union this month contributed $25,000 to “Floridians for Progress,” a political committee linked with

Chief justice looking to boost courthouse security Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Jorge Labarga on Monday has announced the creation of a panel to study local court-

Two females, both about 7 feet long, were caught near the beach, according to a commission report also released Monday.

Officials tested both for evidence of an attack but couldn’t find anything conclusive, the report states.

Both had empty stomachs.

“The victim could have been mistaken for some of the animal’s normal prey like opossum, armadillo or raccoon,” officials wrote.

Since the attack, Disney workers have been building wide boulder walls along the Seven Seas Lagoon beach line in an effort to keep alligators away from guests. They also put up signs warning of alligators and snakes.

The family announced last month that it would not sue the resort.

Bracy. That brought to a total of $55,000 the amount the union had contributed to the committee during the past two months.

Meanwhile, Siplin received $1,000 campaign contributions this month from prominent schoolchoice supporters John

Kirtley and Richard DeVos Jr., newly filed reports show.

Also, Siplin’s campaign received $1,000 from Oberndorf Enterprises, a California company led by William Oberndorf, a board member of the Foundation for Excellence in Education.

The foundation was started by former Gov. Jeb Bush and supports education changes, including expanded school choice.

Bracy and Siplin, along with fellow Democrats Chuck O’Neal and Bob Sindler, are running in the Aug. 30 primary for an open seat in state Senate District 10.

house security.

The Trial Courthouse Security Workgroup will look at issues such as evaluating security practices at courthouses, reviewing national courthouse security procedures and developing standards for training, according to the announcement.

The panel will be chaired

by Margaret Steinbeck, a judge in Southwest Florida's 20th Judicial Circuit.

It will include chief judges from eight judicial circuits, two attorneys and a staff member from the Office of State Courts Administrator.

– News Service of Florida

Randolph Bracy

Gary Siplin

EDITORIAL

A4

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

Even funerals are not family reunions anymore ‘Played the dozens’

Editor’s note – This was one of journalist George Curry’s last regular columns. Black journalists and media owners converged on Tuscaloosa, Ala., this weekend to pay their last respects to Curry, who died on Aug. 20 at age 69.

Most of the relatives on my mother’s side migrated from Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Johnson City, Tenn., where my oldest aunt, Julia Mae Cousin, established roots after she was married. Growing up, I divided my summers between Johnson City and Reform, Ala., where my father’s relatives are anchored.

Because I spent so much time with my cousins, we have always enjoyed a strong bond, stronger than some brothers and sisters. And because we were closer in age, I spent most of the early years romping the streets of Johnson City with Aunt Julia Mae’s kids – Hattie, D.D., Charles and Little Buddy. My cousin, Bertha Mae, was almost a decade older and she was more like an aunt than a cousin.

Eventually moved With her strong personality and huge heart, Aunt Julia urged her siblings to move to this small, east Tennessee town, near the Virginia-Tennessee border. Over the years, a parade of uncles and aunts acquiesced: Uncle Frank, Uncle Buddy, Uncle Percy, Uncle Padna (Jesse) and Aunt Kat. Mama (Martha L. Brownlee) and Big Mama (Sylvia Harris) were the holdouts, preferring to stay in Tuscaloosa but making frequent trips to Johnson City.

GEORGE E. CURRY GEORGE CURRY MEDIA

‘Rec’ and clubs No one loved going to Johnson City more than I did. By day, I lived at the Carver Rec Center with D.D., Charles and Little Buddy and at night, Hattie would take me to one of the Black clubs.

There was a rough one up on Wilson Avenue, but we knew to stay away from there unless Hattie and I had been dispatched by Aunt Julia Mae to look for Uncle Frank.

For the younger members of the family, nothing was more popular than our family reunions that featured us cracking jokes on one another. Aunt Julia warned us each year not to showcase our comical side, which was considerable, and this was the one time we brazenly disobeyed.

Everyone had a story about Uncle Percy, who perfected lying to an art form. Uncle Buddy, a Navy veteran who introduced me to world travel, was easygoing and fun. But he should have known better than to wear red socks to the reunion one year.

As expected, we lit into him, accusing him of everything from having been cut on the ankles to working for the Red Cross.

The next year, the first thing Uncle Buddy did was raise the legs of his pants to show us he was wearing black socks.

Katrina and other catastrophes Eleven years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, killing at least 1,200 people – although no one will ever know the actual death toll because most of the victims were Black and poor and, therefore, were never considered important enough to count.

What was important to the rulers of this country, in the aftermath of Katrina, was making sure that as many as possible of the displaced Black residents would not be allowed to return to the city.

Permanent exile Before the waters had fully subsided, corporate planners were exulting in the opportunity to build a new New Orleans, a much whiter and richer me-

GLEN FORD BLACK AGENDA REPORT

tropolis. Katrina had ethnically cleansed the city – permanently exiling 100,000 Blacks – and the Lords of Capital could not contain their jubilation. What Blacks experienced as catastrophe was celebrated as a renaissance.

Katrina was a godsend for Disaster Capitalism, and provided a model for capitalists to create future disasters for Black people. President Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, said Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education sys-

How will the presidential candidates’ tax plans affect you?

We’ve seen lots of twist and turns during the 2016 presidential election. With all of the political slants and noise, it’s hard for the public to comprehend what is factual and how the proposed polices they are hearing really help their financial and family situation.

Recently, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump laid out their proposed tax plans. What I found encouraging is the simplicity of Mr. Trump’s proposed tax plan that can immediately create a positive impact on millions of everyday families.

Review the policies When most political com-

VISUAL VIEWPOINT: DONALD TRUMP

JENNIFER CARROLL GUEST COMMENTARY

mercials and rhetoric paint the picture that any change to the current tax code only helps the wealthiest, it is important to look into the actual policies put forth by the candidates. Sometimes political noise makes it hard to see how much the average taxpayer would benefit from common sense tax reform.

Under Mrs. Clinton’s plan, she proposes an increase to individual taxes. Under Mr. Trump’s

When he was only 4 or 5 years old, Hattie’s son Robbie surprised everyone by going to the front of the room and cracking on his mother. Hattie gave Robbie a look that only Hattie can give, but it was too late – Robbie had brought the house down.

His brother, Phill, was accused of bringing a rent-a-date to one reunion.

Through those family reunions and hot summers, I grew closer to my younger cousins: Lynn, Phill, Robbie, Charlene, Audrey, Albert, Regina, Greg, the twins (Ronald and Randall), and “Suzie Q” (Katherine Madison).

I had already been close to Uncle Frank’s children, especially the older ones – LuLu, Dosha, Doris, Carolyn, Alberta, Knuck and Herman – because he held out a long time before moving from Tuscaloosa to Johnson City.

Elders, reunions died Over the years, the family elders died – Big Mama, Aunt Kat, Uncle Frank, Uncle Percy, Uncle Padna and, most recently, Aunt Julia Mae, who took over as head of the family upon the death of Big Mama. With each passing, the reunions became fewer and fewer, to the point that we don’t hold them anymore.

In recent years, I have said family funerals have become our family reunions. I told it as a joke, but it was the painful truth.

At my cousin Charlene’s funeral last week, family relations had deteriorated to the point where it was obvious that funerals can

tem in New Orleans” because it allowed school privatizers to fire all of the city’s teachers – 71 percent of them Black – and turn most of the schools into charters.

Instead of firing Duncan for his outrageously callous and deeply racist remarks, President Obama joined in praising the so-called “recovery” of a city that had shed about a third of its Black population and was on the way to becoming the nation’s first all-charter school system.

Over the next several years, Obama’s Race to the Top program would coerce states to create a “market” for charter schools or face the loss of federal education funds. Katrina paved the way to a catastrophe for public education, nationwide.

Black Caucus muzzled During the last weeks of the summer of 2005, when the magnitude of the disaster became apparent, it seemed that almost every Black community organiza-

proposed tax changes, he will give an across-the-board tax cut.

There are very stark differences between the Clinton and Trump tax plan proposals. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that a smaller, simpler, flatter tax plan will be easily understandable and reasonable to help families keep more of what they earn.

Just think If the American taxpayer has lived under a complicated and onerous tax structure that has depleted income from them, why should they embrace keeping it in place and adding more regulations?

While Donald Trump cuts and simplifies the tax code, Hillary Clinton’s plan adds more tax brackets and more ways for the government to reach even deeper into our pockets.

While Clinton will raise taxes immediately, Trump would cut our taxes by two percent. That’s

DAVE GRANLUND, POLITICALCARTOONS.COM

no longer be used as family reunions. For a variety reasons, some relatives refuse to speak to others.

No truces I remain on speaking terms with all of my cousins and have made it clear that whatever dispute they have with one another will not alter my relationship with any relative. I have made appeals for a truce, but my cousins are strong-willed and nothing I or anyone else can say will get them to move off of dead center.

My cousin Lynn said it would be like this when Aunt Julia Mae passed, but I did not want to believe it. Now, I have no choice but to accept that reality. Uncle Buddy and Mama are the only two children of Big Mama still living. And sadly, this next generation of relatives are nowhere near as close as I was to my cousins

tion responded with some kind of Katrina support program. But there was no political response from the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington.

The Democratic Party hoped to regain control of the House of Representatives in the 2006 elections, and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t want the party to appear too pro-Black. She ordered her members to boycott the Republicans’ hearings on Katrina, and Democrats held no hearings of their own. In the face of what was then the greatest Black catastrophe of the 21st century, the Congressional Black Caucus allowed itself to be muzzled.

No resistance

money we can spend on our families. Imagine the debts that can be paid off, savings that can be accrued, and vacations that could be taken with thousands of extra dollars in our pockets.

from 35 percent which remains the highest in the world!

Less taxes for local business means access to more jobs and our families having more opportunities.

Wall Street supports Clinton

Level playing field

Also, for all of Clintons’ rhetoric about taxing the wealthy, the Wall Street banks, hedge funds and political elite are overwhelmingly supporting her candidacy, and it’s not because they want her to tax them more.

Trump is demonstrating with a tax cut that benefits the average taxpayer that he’s the candidate of the middle class, not the special interests.

Clinton’s plan is quite simple for small businesses as well – they will keep paying more taxes and cripple their future and ours. Trump’s tax plan proposes to reduce the corporate tax rate (which will also apply to small business) to 15 percent down

CREDO OF THE BLACK PRESS The Black Press believes that Americans can best lead the world away from racism and national antagonism when it accords to every person, regardless of race, color or creed, full human and legal rights. Hating no person, fearing no person. The Black Press strives to help every person in the firm belief...that all are hurt as long as anyone is held back.

Dr. Valerie Rawls-Cherry, Human Resources

Charles W. Cherry, Sr. (1928-2004), Founder Julia T. Cherry, Senior Managing Member, Central Florida Communicators Group, LLC Dr. Glenn W. Cherry, Cassandra CherryKittles, Charles W. Cherry II, Managing Members

in New Orleans, while the whole world was watching, they could ratchet up the speed of gentrification and Black removal all across the country.

Soon, half of the Black citizens of Michigan were disenfranchised by an emergency financial manager regime that took over all of the state’s heavily Black cities.

The New Orleans model has gone national, because the rulers of this country know that they don’t need a storm to drive Black folks from the cities – and that there will be no resistance from a selfish, useless Black Misleadership Class.

Glen Ford is executive editor of BlackAgendaReport.com. Email him at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com. Click on this commentary at www.flcourier.com to write your own response.

Dr. Glenn W. Cherry, Sales Manager

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George E. Curry was president and CEO of George Curry Media, LLC. He is the former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) News Service. He was also a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. See previous columns at http:// www.georgecurr y.com/columns. Click on this commentary at www.flcourier.com to write your own response.

The Black political class’s abject failure to respond to Katrina guaranteed that there would be more catastrophes for Black folks. The Lords of Capital realized that, if they could get away with massive ethnic cleansing

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.

growing up.

Neither Big Mama nor Aunt Julia Mae would be pleased that our once close-knit family is in shambles. But as long as I have breath in me, I am going to try to get my family back together.

I know it’s a very long shot, but I owe that to Big Mama and Aunt Julia Mae to keep trying.

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Trump’s plan levels the playing field, giving an advantage that helps local communities.

We cannot be advocates for small business while proposing the same regulation and taxation that has driven them out of existence.

As a former small business owner, I know Donald Trump’s plan is music to the ears of struggling, ambitious entrepreneurs in our communities.

It’s time to try something new for the Middle America. It’s not hard to see which tax plan will help you make your American dream come true.

Jennifer Carroll is a former lieutenant governor of Florida.

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AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

Why the Green Party instead of Democrats?

In Houston on the first Saturday of August, the Green Party nominated Jill Stein, a Massachusetts physician, and Ajamu Baraka, a longtime human rights activist, as its presidential and vice presidential candidates for 2016.

Stein’s nomination was a foregone conclusion, having been the Green candidate in 2012 and the only one of several aspirants to raise money, hire staff and campaign across the country full time for more than a year.

A different road Ajamu Baraka followed a different road to the nomination, having been an interested observer but with no organizational connection to the Green Party till now.

Baraka was the founding executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, which still seeks to have the framework of internationally recognized human rights law applied to the victims of social and economic injustice in the U.S. This is a truly radical concept because the supreme law in America is the Constitution, which chiefly guarantees property rights and the rights of corporations but not necessarily the rights of human beings to a quality education, the vote, decent housing, health care, remunerative jobs and the right to organize, or to a safe and clean environment, none of which are mentioned.

Human rights activist Baraka was among the first to demand, in the wake of the Katrina disaster, that the 300,000 or so persons uprooted – the majority of them African-American – be classified as “internally displaced” under international law, a status which would have guaranteed them the right to return to the cities and towns from which they were displaced and dispersed to the four corners of the US. Since the 1980s, Baraka has been a consistent and principled critic of imperial US foreign policy over the years in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Middle East. He’s served in and led fact-finding delegations to Central America, Cuba, Israel-Palestine, Colombia and other places.

In the wake of the 2010 hunger strike waged by Georgia prisoners, Baraka led an unprecedented civilian inspection team into two state prisons where they were able to interview staff and prisoners alike.

I count both Jill and Ajamu as comrades and personal friends.

I was on Jill’s campaign staff for several months. Baraka has more than 50 articles published at Black Agenda Report.

BRUCE A. DIXON BLACK AGENDA REPORT

Isn’t it time to start being the change we want to see? That won’t happen inside the Democratic Party.

It’s been tried again and again.

Why Baraka?

It’s not a simple matter of putting a Black face on the ticket.

Greens have run Black candidates in local and national races before without managing to make a significant dent in traditional Black allegiances to the Democratic Party.

Stein chose Baraka because one of her campaign’s objectives is to strengthen state and local Green parties. As a result of his more than four decades of work in the movement, Baraka has longstanding personal ties with and has been mentor to many of the activists involved in the Black Lives Matter movement around the country.

If anyone can carry the message to these forces that now is the time for organizing alternative centers of struggle for political power – centers of struggle outside the two capitalist parties and outside the nonprofit industrial complex – that someone is Ajamu Baraka.

Slowly growing African-American voters have long been the rock upon which the Democratic Party’s voting coalition rests. But since Blacks vote Democratic mainly out of fear of the Republicans, they are a captive constituency whose votes are counted but whose demands are ignored.

Jill and the Greens know it will take more than running good Black or Brown candidates to make its Black, Latin and working-class captive constituencies climb out of the Democrats’ trunk. Realistically, that won’t much happen this election.

The candidacies of Greens like Joshua Harris in Baltimore and Ashley Flash Gordon in Travis County, Texas are signs that something new and unprecedented is peeking over the horizon, some-

Disproportionate punishment At sentencing, prosecutors recommended an 18-month sentence followed by two years of probation; the defense requested that Cherilus be given probation. Destry sentenced him to 10 years in prison, which Cherilus subsequently appealed to Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal (DCA).

A day after my commentary went to print, the Fourth DCA

The Fourth DCA ordered that Cherilus be resentenced in a manner consistent with its ruling. In a strong rebuke to just how far afield Destry had strayed from constitutional principles, the court took the unusual step of requiring that Cherilus be resentenced by a judge other than Destry.

VISUAL VIEWPOINT: COLIN POWELL AND HILLARY’S E-MAILS

DAVE GRANLUND, POLITICALCARTOONS.COM

Deliberate obstacles A frequently asked question is why Greens run candidates for president every year, but haven’t elected or even run candidates in many states for state reps and state senators, for county commissioners and members of congress. The answer is really simple.

The two capitalist parties protect themselves against competitors with a briar patch, a minefield of provisions and conditions expressly designed to make it all but impossible for parties not financed by the one percent to appear on the ballot.

In many states, candidates who are not Democrats or Republicans are prohibited from appearing on the ballot until after their parties have scored one percent, two percent or five percent, depending on the state, in a statewide election.

This legal requirement in states like Georgia that Greens must score tens or hundreds of thousands of votes in statewide races before being allowed to run in local races is one more of the deliberate obstacles Democrats and Republicans have erected to competition from third parties at the ballot box.

Why the Green Party?

For the last fifty years, Republicans have deliberately made themselves the party of White racists and nativists. Democrats talk a different game, but are responsible to the same one percenters who fund Republicans. So once in office, Democrats govern pretty much like Republicans.

In fact, Democratic presidents and governors frequently enact the oppressive policies we won’t allow Republicans to enact. NAFTA came up twice during the first Bush presidency and failed. It took a Democrat, President Clinton, to rally enough right-wing Democrats to ally with Republicans to get it into law.

Ending public aid was also something no Republican could do, but Democrats only need the support of the Black and poor when they’re candidates, not so much when they’re governing.

If Destry’s reversal in the Cherilus case could be chalked up to being an anomaly, there may be insufficient grounds to assert his unfitness to continue serving as a Broward County circuit judge.

Local media, however, have widely reported about Destry’s questionable rulings, unduly harsh sentencing, courtroom antics and ill temperament on the bench.

Of note is an investigation of Destry’s rulings by the South Florida New Times newspaper which uncovered that last year alone, Destry’s decisions were overturned 11 times by Fourth DCA. JOHNNY L. The publication’s investigation of Destry’s rulings found them to MCCRAY, JR., be unduly harsh and seemingly ESQ. random. For instance, Destry sentenced a man who raped a midGUEST COMMENTARY dle-school girl to 2 ½ years, while overturned Destry’s sentence in sentencing another man who vioa blistering opinion which con- lated probation to 60 years. demned the sentence as a violation of Cherilus’ constitutional Backed by clergy? right to due process. The court Inexplicably and surprisingly, specifically found that Destry a group of local Black clergy callcould not impose a sentence in ing themselves “The Concerned excess of six times the prosecuClergy of Broward County,” along tion’s recommendation based on with a few political operatives Judge Destry’s stated belief on the within the Black community, rerecord that Cherilus’ in-court tes- cently endorsed Destry in his bid timony was untruthful. Such an for reelection in the Group 15 juapproach to sentencing would dicial race. have a chilling effect on a defenDestry’s name, among othdant’s right to testify at trial. er candidates (judicial and non-

Destry dumped

A5

thing that will challenge the vacuity and lack of vision of the Black political class. It’s not a challenge mature enough to accomplish a string of local electoral victories across the country. But it’s real, it’s gaining ground, building experience and it’s not going away.

The present Black political class and the leadership model that supports it have been in place pretty much since the days of Booker T. Washington twelve decades ago. They won’t be displaced this election cycle, but their political bankruptcy is every bit as real and obvious as that of their White counterparts.

Clergy, activists must vet judicial candidates before endorsements Last week, I wrote a commentary published in this paper entitled, “Broward circuit judge doesn’t deserve re-election.” I prefaced my commentary by stating that in nearly 35 years of practicing law, I had never written an article opposing a judicial candidate in any election.

In support of my position that Judge Matthew Destry is an unfit judge, I cited four cases which exemplify his predilection for harsh and unfair sentencing.

One case involved first-time drug offender, Maxime Cherilus, who was convicted of delivery of cocaine after he delivered a small amount to an undercover police officer in a sting operation.

EDITORIAL

judicial), has been included on palm cards and pressed into the proverbial “flesh” for the Black vote.

Given Destry’s well-documented record on the bench and his growing list of affronts to justice, how it is that Destry rose to his coveted place on those palm cards? What, if any, due diligence was undertaken prior to unleashing Destry’s endorsement on the

Finishing GOP’s work The 2008 Bush bailout went before a Democratic Congress and it failed. Barack Obama had to suspend his campaign for a week and come to D.C. and work the phones to flip the Congressional Black Caucus and enough other Democrats to pass the Bush bailout, which he quadrupled down on once in the White House.

Again it was a blow no Republican could have struck, though many wanted to.

Obama used stimulus money to fund what he called “Race to The Top,” a drive to privatize public education that resulted in the closing and privatization of thousands of public schools, and pushed hundreds of thousands of qualified, experienced public school educators out of the classroom. This too was something no Republican could have accomplished, much as they wanted to.

There are many similar examples of Democrats accomplishing the right-wing goals Republicans can only talk about on the state and local levels.

Republicans like Donald Trump talk about how they’d like to do mass deportations. But our First Black President has deported two million people – more than any other three presidents combined – after promising Latino voters “a road to citizenship” in both his campaigns.

The only reason to vote for Democrats is our fear of Republicans, and as Jill Stein says, this politics of fear has delivered to us everything we were afraid of.

It didn’t work

of the formal workforce into increasingly precarious economic situations.

At the end of the reign of our First Black President – a Democrat when Blacks have been the rock and mainstay of Democratic voting coalitions for two generations – 40 percent of Black children are growing up in poverty.

Isn’t it time for some new questions?

She needs us Trump is a bumbling clown and a bogeyman. He’s raising a fraction of the money Mitt Romney raised four years ago.

Hillary Clinton has a billion dollars to campaign with and most of the corporate media. If she can’t beat this fool with all the resources available to her, why is it up to us? Hillary ought to be, and ought to have been helping us, not the other way around.

I don’t expect the Greens to win the presidential election. But the U.S. system is almost 250 years old, one of the most elderly on the planet. Its creaks and cracks are highly visible and aren’t going away.

What comes next?

Isn’t it time to start imagining and building what comes next after capitalism, genocide and ecocide, patriarchy and White supremacy?

Isn’t it time to start being the change we want to see? That won’t happen inside the Democratic Party. It’s been tried again and again.

It’s time to build something different. So why not the Green Party?

People voted Democratic to end the war in Iraq, but we got more war in the Middle East and Africa.

People voted Democrat to raise the minimum wage and see millions of new jobs created. But the minimum wage has barely risen, Bruce Dixon is managing ediand the only reason official unemployment figures are down tor of BlackAgendaReport.com. is that Obama’s policies have Contact him at bruce.dixon@ pushed millions of people out blackagendareport.com.

Black community?

Did these ‘community leaders’ reach out to any local practicing attorneys, voluntary bar associations, or other individuals familiar with Judge Destry’s record to gather pertinent information in determining his fitness to sit as a judge?

Was research conducted by perusing any of his numerous rulings that have been reviewed by the appellate courts and overturned on appeal?

High scrutiny required

This year will be especially complicated with roughly 30 judicial candidates – including several challengers vying for two open seats. Destry himself has racked up four challengers to his seat.

My message to preachers To local clergy who choose to endorse candidates in an effort to influence the vote of congregants and community members: the exercise of such discretion may be your right. But with that right, there is a corollary moral duty to properly vet judicial candidates before assigning your stamp of approval and before encouraging the community to hand these candidates the Black vote.

As faith leaders in our community, your aim should be to become properly informed about the judicial candidates by (among other things) evaluating their records for fairness, consistency and impartiality. Such prudence would help to ensure that candidates for judicial positions are well-qualified and would give some semblance of credibility to your highly coveted endorsements.

Not long ago, the Black community was earnestly petitioning for Destry’s removal from the bench following his sentencing of Herbert Smith to 60 years’ imprisonment for a probation violation. One can only wonder what the Honorable Matthew Destry has done to now earn such reversal of fortunes.

Endorsements of judicial candidates serve useful purposes for both candidates and voters. However, endorsements should not be arbitrarily or capriciously made.

Judicial elections are markedly different from other elections, and by the very nature of the position to which candidates aspire and the inherent powers to which the victors will ascend, heightened diligence and scrutiny are warranted.

As Broward voters head to the polls for the primary election on Tuesday, August 30, 2016, most will approach the voting booth with a good idea of who they want to elect for mayor or city commission, and, possibly, the school board.

Many will be surprised to see that the bulk of the ballot will be filled with scores of unfamiliar names of persons running for seats on Broward County’s courts.

Few would disagree that the majority at the polls are unfamiliar with the backgrounds of the judicial candidates and have little information to be in a position to Johnny L. McCray, Jr. is an atevaluate how wellsuited candidates are to perform the job of a torney in private practice in the judge.

South Florida area.

TOJ A6

NATION

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016 tions as science has proved these techniques far from reliable.

Bite marks The evidence: Until about two decades ago, bite mark evidence was regularly used in courtrooms across the country and thought to be near infallible.

The problem: Forensic scientists have since discovered bite marks to be far less reliable in linking specific individuals to crimes.

Brooks said this is because bite marks can be mistaken for other injuries, they deform over time, and their analysis is extremely subjective to the person who examines them. It is still used today, but its reliability is much more disputed.

“There’s a real problem here,” Rowe said. “Someone really needs to direct the research to test it.”

Fire analysis

PHOTOS BY PAUL MOSELEY/FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM/TNS

Attorney Nina Morrision gets a hug from John Nolley after the hearing outside of the courthouse on May 17 in Fort Worth, Texas.

In Judge Louis Sturns’ 213th District Court, John Nolley, was released from custody after 19 years behind bars due to efforts by The Innocence Project. Nolley had been found guilty of murder in 1998.

Exonerations in US at a record high The focus of many defense attorneys and advocacy groups has shifted in recent years from DNA analysis to debunking decadesold investigative tactics, such as bite mark analysis and forced confessions.

BY MEGAN HENNEY AND CHRISTOPER HUFFAKER TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON – The rate of criminal exonerations in America is at a record high.

But experts say that, in many instances, these cases are getting harder and harder to litigate because so many of them now stem from cases that lack concrete DNA evidence.

According to the nation’s largest database on wrongful convictions, while DNA evidence accounted for nearly 40 percent of all exonerations a decade ago,

much has changed. In 2015, DNA evidence played a role in less than one-fifth of cases where sentences were overturned.

As a result, the focus of many defense attorneys and advocacy groups has shifted in recent years from DNA analysis to debunking decades-old investigative tactics, such as bite mark analysis and forced confessions.

Professor Richard Leo at the University of San Francisco School of Law said this decline in the prevalence of DNA-based exonerations comes as no surprise.

“Now, if there is biological evidence to be tested, it’s used in the pretrial stage,” he said.

‘The second wave’ The focus on overturning oldschool forensics is part of what Justin Brooks, director of the California Innocence Project, calls the “second wave” in the fight to overturn wrongful convictions.

“First was the slam-dunk DNA cases; those opened the door to all this other stuff,” Brooks said.

“Courts are now open to the conversation and are more willing to grant cases. That just wasn’t true 20 years ago.”

John Nolley holds one of his grandchildren, whom he had never seen, after a review hearing in Fort Worth, Texas, on May 17. His sons Bryson Nolley, left, and Tavon Seaton, right, look on.

Brooks said that while this massive shift toward non-DNA exonerations has provided his advocacy group and others like it new opportunities to prove clients’ innocence, a lack of “slamdunk” DNA evidence makes overcoming the burden of proof a very difficult task.

“The biggest challenge is … you can show that the evidence is faulty, but it doesn’t necessarily knock the case out completely,” he said. “We don’t know definitively that the person is innocent.”

Researchers on DNA Indeed, according to a 2009

BY MEGAN HENNEY AND CHRISTOPER HUFFAKER TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON – It sounds like something out of a prime-time TV drama.

Attorneys, with help from new science, debunk old testimonies and theories in cases long closed, finally proving that the person who has maintained his innocence is, in fact, innocent.

But it’s not fiction: It’s a nuanced, sometimes controversial trend that’s becoming more common across the United States every year.

Since 2013, the number of conviction integrity units, a division of a prosecutorial office that works to identify and correct wrongful convictions, has more than doubled in the United States, rising from 12 counties to 26 across the country. To be sure, the number remains low – there are more than 3,000 counties in the United States. But they are having an impact.

Texas had most In the wave of steadily increasing exonerations – in 2015, more people were exonerated than any other year before – conviction re-

view units played a major role.

Of the 156 exonerations that took place in 2015, a record 60 stemmed from the work of the review units, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project by the University of Michigan Law School.

The trend is particularly evident in Texas, a law-and-order state perhaps better known for the high number of convicts that it sentences to death each year.

It has the most exonerations by conviction review units of any state, the most exonerations in general and the second highest number of review units.

The idea for a county-level conviction review unit originated in Dallas nine years ago – although a less official but similar effort by the district attorney’s office was already under way in Santa Clara, California – in light of years’ of high-profile exonerations stemming from new DNA evidence.

report released by the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have found that DNA is the only type of evidence that can consistently and confidently connect specific individuals to crimes or prove innocence.

More generally, they found that laboratory-based methods like DNA and fingerprint analysis are more reliable than on-scene techniques such as fire analysis.

DNA remains the gold standard of forensic techniques.

However, here are a just a few of the most flawed tactics and types of evidence that have contributed to the latest spike in exonera-

AUTUMN PAYNE/SACRAMENTO BEE/TNS

Perhaps the primary reason for the popularity of review units in Texas, said Cynthia Alkon, a law professor at the Texas A&M School of Law, is the willingness of the state legislature to review and change laws because of the exonerations.

For instance, in 2011 a man named Michael Morton, who spent nearly 25 years in prison, was exonerated for the murder of his wife after DNA evidence implicated someone else.

The prosecutor in the case was found guilty of prosecutorial misconduct, including withholding evidence, and tampering with evidence and government records.

City’s bad reputation More than 150 defendants on death row have been exonerated nationwide since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that provides analysis regarding capital punishment. In at least 20 cases, DNA played a substantial role in establishing innocence.

A 2013 University of Texas/ Texas Tribune poll showed the

Richard Alex Williams of California is shown on Nov. 2, 2015, his first day free after being acquitted for a 1996 murder. After three trials, the first a hung jury, the second convicted him of first degree murder and was then tossed out, he was set free. He spent 18 years in jail. majority of Texans believed that death penalties are given wrongfully “occasionally” or “a great deal of the time.”

“Dallas had a bad reputation (for wrongful convictions), really,” said Mike Ware, who was the first director of Dallas County’s review unit.

He now serves as executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas, a nonprofit in Fort Worth that investigates claims of innocence.

But because Dallas had preserved its evidence for an unusually long time – it had DNA from cases that were decades old – it was easier for the unit to investigate defendants’ claims of in-

Forced confessions The evidence: It wasn’t long ago that a confession was considered the absolute gold standard for criminal prosecutions. Few judges or jurors could possibly fathom why a person would confess to a crime he or she didn’t commit.

The problem: A record number of exonerations recorded by the National Registry of exonerations last year resulted from false confessions.

In 2015, 13 out of 22 victims of false convictions in homicide cases were both under 18 and mentally handicapped to some degree. But it was a case that occurred over 40 years ago that set a major precedent for overturning these kinds of convictions.

Why 2015 was record year for the wrongfully convicted Conviction review units played major role in exonerations

The evidence: Until fairly recently, Brooks said fire investigators based their beliefs on whether or not a fire was started intentionally on intuition and personal experience rather than scientific evidence.

The problem: Often times, these “fire experts,” which Brooks said in many cases were simply glorified firefighters, erroneously believed that signs like the occurrence of multiple points of ignition directly pointed to arson.

“They are probably the most poorly trained of all the people who investigate criminal activity,” said Rowe. “Most of what they do is basically folklore or guesswork, especially point-of-origin investigation.” This means people might have spent decades in prison in cases that involved no crime at all because a natural fire was mistaken for arson.

Richard Meier, director of the National Association of Fire Investigators and a fire investigator in Sarasota, said there were no standards or certifications at all until the 1980s, and even today many fire investigators do not follow those standards.

As an example, he said, “fire patterns” that some believe indicate the use of accelerants often mean nothing at all or might even be evidence against arson.

nocence and, in some cases, to prove they had been wrongfully convicted. “They were starting to get some sort of statewide and maybe even national attention for the DNA exonerations that were coming out of Dallas,” Ware said.

25 years lost Although the idea was perceived as politically risky – maybe even politically disastrous – at the time, Ware said, the rationale for a unit that reviews convictions caught on across Texas, and eventually across the country. Now, the state is rivaled in the numbers of conviction review units only by New York and California.

Michael Morton Act Nearly two years later, thenGov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed into law the Michael Morton Act, which requires prosecutors to keep records of and turn over any evidence to the defense, Alkon said.

“It sounds like a really simple thing that should’ve already been in place,” she said. “But it wasn’t.”

Alkon, who was previously a public defender in California, said she has not seen these types of changes in other states.

“I think they were consciously and critically looking at why these people were being wrongfully convicted,” she said of the Texas legislature.

Eleanor Mueller and John Tompkins contributed to this report.

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AUGUST 26 – SEPT. 1, 2016

Nate Parker catching flak about response to rape case See page B5

SHARING BLACK LIFE, STATEWIDE

Tom Joyner reunion returns to Florida with plenty of celebs See page B2

Plenty

SOUTH FLORIDA / TREASURE COAST AREA

WWW.FLCOURIER.COM

OF ROOM AT THESE INNS

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF AKWAABA BED AND BREAKFAST INNS

Monique Greenwood is the founder of Akwaaba Bed and Breakfast Inns. She said the companies’ five inns offer upscale accommodations in historic properties “with old-fashioned hospitality and modern-day conveniences.’’

The Mansion at Noble Lane in Pennsylvania is one of the five luxury inns owned

by Monique Greenwood and her husband, Glenn Pogue.

Here’s a view from the balcony of The Mansion at Noble Lane in Bethany, Pa.

At right is one of the rooms at the Akwaaba Mansion, a bed and breakfast in Brooklyn, New York.

Guests can relax on the veranda of the Akwaaba Mansion in Brooklyn, New York.

Bed and breakfast business profitable for Black couple

BY PATRICE GAINES URBAN NEWS SERVICE

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or Monique Greenwood, the decision to be an entrepreneur came down to legacy building.

“I could leave my daughter a portfolio of real estate and a business to run, but I couldn’t leave her a job at Essence,” said Greenwood, who was then editor-in-chief of that popular magazine.

She chose the bed and breakfast business because she loved staying at inns and thought she had the perfect personality for it.

“You have to have a heart of service and genuinely like people,” said Greenwood.

‘Unique model’ These days she might be called a queen of B&Bs, especially among African-American inn owners. She’s been in this business since 1996 and owns five luxury properties with her husband, Glenn Pogue, operating as Akwaaba Bed & Breakfast Inns.

“While numerous inns have multiple buildings, to have five separate entities is not common,” said Kris Ullmer, executive director of the Professional Association of Innkeepers International. There are just “a small

percentage of innkeepers with that level of longevity,” said Ullmer about Greenwood’s 21 years in the business.

Greenwood has built a “unique model,” said fellow inn owner Daniel Edwards of Morehead Manor in Durham, North Carolina. “She has a brand she promotes. You will have a different experience at each of her properties.”

Old-fashioned and modern Greenwood’s inns offer upscale accommodations in historic properties “with old-fashioned hospitality and modern-day conveniences,” she said.

Guests are called by their names and there are amenities such as freshsqueezed lemonade served on the front porch.

Edwards said when he and his wife opened their business in 1997, many White inns depended on a travel guide to attract lodgers.

“They put a picture of the property and a bio of the innkeepers,” Edwards said. “But as African-Americans, we couldn’t do that, or we would be shooting ourselves in the foot.”

In short, White travelers were unlikely to check into Black-owned B&Bs.

Early travelers’ dilemma In one sense, Blacks had a network of B&Bs during segregation. Unable to stay at White-owned hotels, Black travelers used “The Negro Motorist Green Book,’’ published from 1936 to 1966, to find African-Americanowned-and-operated lodging.

Sandra Butler-Truesdale, once a cosmetologist for James Brown’s and Ray Charles’ bands, remembers how unforgiving the road was for Black musicians.

“Entertainers and people who traveled a lot stayed with relatives and friends, and there were certain guest houses,” said Butler-Truesdale. “Some musicians had buses and they did one-night stands and slept on their buses, heading to other engagements.

Sometimes buses stopped at gas stations where people could change and wash themselves.”

Global guests When Greenwood opened her first inn in Brooklyn, guests were generally family, friends and neighbors. About 95 percent of their guests were Black then, versus 40 percent today.

“We still have these clients in Brooklyn, but many more guests are coming from all over the world simply for vacation,” said Greenwood.

Early on, she and her family occupied the top floor of the Brooklyn establishment.

“The business made enough money for us to live in a beautiful mansion, rent- and expense-free, so we began building up a nest egg from our dayjob income to be able to buy more property.”

Today, Greenwood has 13 employees.

“In 2015, Akwaaba’s sales surpassed the million-dollar mark, with much of the profit being reinvested back into the company,” she said.

The Mansion She and her husband own other commercial properties, which they have patiently used as collateral to invest in buying and renovating inns.

“What has been most important is maintaining stellar personal credit, and doing that often requires being a pro at delayed gratification,” said Greenwood.

Her ownership of The Mansion at Noble Lane symbolizes how much America has changed. The 25,000 square-foot, 14-room Gilded Age inn in Bethany, Pennsylvania was the estate of the founders of the F.W. Woolworth Company.

Mary Grate Pyos of Burke, Virginia, who had stayed at Akwaaba in Washington, D.C., attended the opening of The Mansion.

“What’s so exciting about that inn is — as an African-American, who not so long ago was unable to sit at the Woolworth counter and get a cup of water. I now get to witness a Black woman owning the Woolworth estate,” said Pyos. “I wanted to cheer her on.”

Greenwood, an astute businesswoman with a love for Afro-centrism, said she chose the name Akwaaba because it means “welcome” in the Ghanaian language of Twi, “represents a connection to the Motherland” and because it starts with A — “generally making us first on most lists.”

For more information, visit akwaaba. com.

“What’s so exciting about that inn is — as an African-American, who not so long ago was unable to sit at the Woolworth counter and get a cup of water. I now get to witness a Black woman owning the Woolworth estate. I wanted to cheer her on.”

Mary Grate Pyos of Burke, Virginia, who attended the opening of The Mansion at Noble Lane in Bethany, Pa.

CALENDAR

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FLORIDA COMMUNITY CALENDAR Jacksonville: A Kings & Queens of Hip Hop concert is Aug. 27 at the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena.

Artists will include DMX, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Trina and Scarface.

ami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami Beach and Sept. 1 at St. Petersburg’s Mahaffey Theater.

Fort Lauderdale: The Keb’ Mo’ Band will perform Sept. 22 at the Parker Playhouse.

Miami Beach: Leon Bridges will perform Sept. 13 at the Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater.

Miami: Drake’s Summer Sixteen Tour, which features Future, makes an Aug. 30 stop at the AmericanAirlines Arena.

Jacksonville: Kenny G stops by the Florida Theatre Jacksonville on Sept. 1 for an 8 p.m. show.

Orlando: Dru Hill and Lyfe Jennings perform Aug. 27 at House of Blues Orlando for a 7 p.m. show.

Miami: Kanye West’s The Saint Pablo Tour stops at American Airlines Arena on Sept. 16.

Miami: The Bad Boy Family Reunion will be at the AmericanAirlines Arena on Sept. 10 and Tampa’s Amalie Arena on Sept.

11. Performers will include Puff Daddy (Sean Combs), Faith Evans, Lil Kim and French Montana.

Jacksonville: Jill Scott takes the stage Aug. 28 at the Times Union Center for the Performing Arts, Aug. 30 at the Fillmore Mi-

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

STOJ

CONFUNKSHUN TOM JOYNER ERICA CAMPBELL The Allstate Tom Joyner Family Reunion will be at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Kissimmee from Sept.

1-Sept. 5. The event will feature plenty of celebrity guests and performers, including the legendary group ConFunkShun featuring Michael Cooper, Jill Scott, El DeBarge and Erica Campbell. Details: FamilyReunion.BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Orlando: Tickets are on sale now for a Legends of the Old School concert at CFE Arena starring Bell Biv Devoe, Debbie Gibson, Rob Base and 69 Boyz on Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. Details: www.cfearena.com Daytona Beach: Catch Gerald Albright and Jeffrey Osborne on Oct. 22 at the Peabody Auditorium and Oct. 23 at The Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg.

This ‘Underground Railroad’ is more than a metaphor DR. GLENN C. ALTSCHULER SPECIAL TO THE FLORIDA COURIER

As Colson Whitehead’s searing new novel opens, Cora, a teenage slave, “who had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows,” and her mother abscond without saying goodbye or contacting her when she was free, is beaten by the owner of the cotton plantation – and decides to escape to the north on the underground railroad.

“If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride this rails,” Lumbly, a station master on the Georgia line, tells her.

“Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.”

The underground railroad, we learn, actually exists, as a system of trains, tracks, stations and conductors, operating far below the American soil, taking runaways across state lines.

BOOK REVIEW

Review of “The Underground Railroad: A Novel’’ by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 306 pages. $26.95

‘Magical realism’ Before her final stop, Cora will ride the railroad, landing in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana, “each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of

Uhuru leader to be honored for 1966 removal of mural

Omali Yeshitela, formerly known as Joseph Waller, will be honored during a reception on Sept. 13 at 6 p.m. at the Uhuru House, 1245 18th Ave. S., St. Petersburg.

Yeshitela, founder of the Uhuru Movement and chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, will tell the story of the 1966 protest that culminated in his tearing down of a mural that once hung in St. Petersburg’s City Hall.

He was a local leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

doing things.” She will discover that Lumbly’s words were a joke: “There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be a darkness.”

The author of five previous novels, Whitehead has made frequent use of “magical realism.”

Given its foundational premise – that the underground railroad was actually a subterranean transportation system, not a metaphor – some more literal-minded readers of this book may find it difficult to integrate the magic with the realism. They may ask how the system could be built and operated without detection by White southerners who were nothing if not vigilant about runaway slaves.

Memorable characters Readers may be distracted as well by the lack of historical specificity in

“The Underground Railroad’’ is the latest novel by Colson Whitehead, above. the novel and by dialogue (“Can’t have our Cora looking like the floor of a butcher’s shop”) that reflects a modern tone and texture.

That said, it is clear that “The Underground Railroad’’ is a suspenseful, spellbinding novel that conveys the appalling, barbaric realities of slavery.

The characters take hold of you and do not let go.

The most memorable, it seems to me, is Ridgeway, the cynical, 6-foot-6-inch slave catcher. Ridgeway is an Ahab obsessed with returning Cora to the Randall planation because he has failed to bring back Mabel, her mother.

Accompanying him ev-

erywhere is Homer, his Pip, who refuses to be emancipated, Ridgeway explains, “because he knew a black boy has no future” and would inevitably be snatched by someone and “put on the block licketysplit. With me, he can learn about the world. Find purpose.”

The bottom line But for his obsession about Cora, Ridgeway always sticks to the bottom line. Having captured Jasper, a runaway slave, Jaspar shoots him in the face.

The reward was $50, minus $15 for the man who brought the fugitive to jail, he claims, but it would take

three weeks to return Jasper (who had to be supplied with some food) to his owner: “the lost bounty was a small price to pay for silence and a restful mind.”

Homer consults his notebook, checks his boss’ figures and says “He’s right.”

The conversations between Ridgeway and Cora constitute the moral center of the novel, testimony to the indomitable will of African-Americans.

“For every slave I bring home,” Ridgeway proclaims, “twenty others abandon their full moon schemes. I’m a notion of order... the name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step,” and undermining any and all hopes of freedom.

Maybe he is right, Cora thinks, “that the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed God’s will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass.”

Dr. Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

(SNCC) 50 years ago. Along with other SNCC members, he removed the mural on Dec. 29, 1966.

Yeshitela and the local SNCC branch had repeatedly petitioned St. Petersburg in writing to remove the mural that had been displayed Omali on the stairwell of City Hall Yeshitela since the early 1940s.

The mural depicted caricatures of African people playing music on the beach for White revelers, “in the most despicable, derogatory manner,” stated Yeshitela.

Yeshitela was sentenced to five years on multiple felony charges and served 2½ years in prison.

To RSVP for the event, call 727-8883739 or email stpete@uhurusolidarity.org.

South Dade Alphas donate supplies to elementary school The Iota Pi Lambda Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. recently adopted Dr. William A. Chapman Elementary School in Miami-Dade County as its 2016 Adopt-A-Classroom grant recipient. Dr. Chapman was one of Miami’s first Black physicians, known for his educational programs on communicable diseases.

Chapman Elementary will receive several hundred dollars in educational supplies and teaching materials from the Alphas. In the photo, Alpha members Chris Stevenson and Gerson Sanchez standing beside one of the teachers at the school.

FLCOURIER.COM flcourier.com

Read All About Black Life, Statewide!

STOJ

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

HEALTH

B3

A growing mental health crisis in Flint Health care workers and community leaders said they’ve seen increased anxiety in all ages – kids through senior citizens – because of the water crisis.

BY ELISHA ANDERSON DETROIT FREE PRESS/TNS

FLINT, Mich. – People living in Flint are experiencing mental health issues caused by the ongoing water crisis, including stress, anxiety and fear over what the future holds as they continue to rely on bottled water and filters more than two years after problems first surfaced with the drinking water.

A widespread concern for residents throughout the lead-poisoned city is not knowing how they, or their children and grandchildren, may be impacted because of exposure to the contaminated water.

“You try to keep going like everything’s OK,” Angie Thornton-George said of living with the water crisis that still has no known end date. “But … it’s not OK.”

PHOTOS BY RYAN GARZA/DETROIT FREE PRESS/TNS

“I don’t know how it’s impacted my health. I’m very emotional just because of my concern for other people. The bottom line is it’s wrong. This is not the way we should have to live,” Angie Thornton-George, of Flint, said on Thursday, Aug. 4 at her home on Flint’s south side. ing, drinking and brushing teeth — even bathing her children because she said she doesn’t want her kids sitting in the tap water.

Adding to the strain of getting bottled water in the city where 40 percent of people live in poverty, Turner doesn’t have transportation. Family or neighbors bring bottled water to her or she’ll walk to pick it up, she said.

“It’s hard and stressful,” she said of living with the water crisis.

Kids, adults worried Thornton-George, like others in town, wonders what effect the water will have on her down the road.

“It’s not so much that you’re like just walking around in fear, but it’s always in the back of your mind – what will happen to me in later years that may be a result of the drinking of this water?” said Thornton-George, 48.

Health care workers and community leaders said they’ve seen increased anxiety in all ages – kids through senior citizens – because of the situation. They point out there are more resources to help families and if people take advantage of them, their children are much more likely to have positive outcomes.

Speech issues

William Davis, 2, and Arianna Davis, 5, look out the front door of their home in Flint’s north side on Aug. 5.

Government distrust Meanwhile, many residents in the city of 98,000 are living the same way they’ve been living for months: picking up cases of free bottled water from distribution centers for daily use, stacking them up at their homes and questioning how much longer they have to live this way.

Distrust of government officials remains rampant.

Many have filters on their faucets but don’t use them or don’t believe it when they’re told the filters make water safe from lead when properly used, pointing out they once were told their water was safe when it wasn’t.

Some don’t even bathe in the water despite assurances from government officials that it’s safe to do so. Instead, heating bottled water or showering at homes outside the city remain part of their daily routine.

Thornton-George said members of St. Mark Missionary Baptist, the Flint

Pastor Kevin Thompson of St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church said he isn’t able to perform baptisms at his church for fear of exposing his church members to the Flint water. church where she works, are scared. She said they look at their children and wonder whether they’ll be OK.

‘Hard and stressful’ Lead poisoning, experts say, can cause learning disabilities, speech and language problems and an increased risk for behavior-

al issues. Parents wonder whether, and how, their children will be impacted.

“It isn’t like if you’ve been exposed to lead in three weeks ABC and D is going to happen,” said Kathi Horton, president of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, which has seven funds related to the water crisis. “It takes a

As the body changes, so should diets for seniors

BY JEFF CLARK SUN HERALD/TNS

It’s no secret the body changes as we age. And these changes may affect what types of food and drinks we should consume.

According to everydayhealth.com, the body’s metabolism or the ability to convert food into energy

slows as one gets older. Although a daily exercise regimen will help speed up metabolism, the amount of food you eat also will directly affect your metabolism.

The digestive system also changes with age. The changes in the digestive system can make it harder for the body to absorb the nutrients it receives from food.

Another factor that can affect the eating patterns in seniors is a change in appetite. With many seniors taking at least one type of medication, the medications could increase or decrease the appetite of seniors.

So what types of changes should seniors be making in their diets?

while to manifest itself. Its impact can be long-term and so parents are living with the anxiety … of what is going to happen.”

Precious Turner, a 25-year-old mother of four, sat outside her Flint home as she watched her kids play last month. For months, she has relied on bottled water for cook-

Stay hydrated One of the key factors in the senior diet is water.

According to theseniorlist.com, it is recommended that seniors consume at least eight, 8-ounce glasses of water daily. The website recommends drinking two glasses of water upon waking, a glass 30 minutes before each meal and a glass of water before going to bed.

A colorful plate Fresh fruits and vegetables also play a huge role in the senior diet.

Webmd.com recom-

Turner, whose family drank the lead-contaminated water through 2015, worries about what could happen to her children, ranging from ages 2 to 5, and points out speech issues she noticed with her 4-year-old. She said she plans to take her daughter to see a doctor.

She said she can’t understand many of the things her daughter says and wonders whether the water is to blame. Residents throughout the city have similar concerns.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician who helped expose the lead problem in Flint and is director of the Michigan State University and Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Public Health Initiative, said families want to know whether the lead-contaminated water caused issues they are seeing.

“Many people are attributing everything to the water, and maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” she said. “Part of environment health disasters is it’s very difficult to prove causation.”

‘A trauma’ Hanna-Attisha said if she diagnoses a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or a speech delay, she can’t say if the lead caused it.

“Maybe the kid was always supposed to have

mends that seniors adding blueberries, raspberries, spinach, kale and Swiss chard to your diet. Vegetables that are red or orange also have many benefits to the body including antioxidants and high amounts of vitamins.

Fruits and vegetables should make up half of a dinner plate.

For bones and heart Deteriorating bone density also is a problem many seniors face. Calcium is good for keeping bones strong. Dairy products such as milk, cheese

this problem. Maybe it was something else,” she said.

“We don’t know.”

Meanwhile, she said, every day health professionals see families facing stress, anxiety and trauma because of the water crisis. Parents feel guilt, wonder whether they poisoned their child and question what is going to happen next, Hanna-Attisha said.

She said there are lots of referrals for mental health resources and it’s become a recognized part of the crisis.

“Think of it like PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder),” she said. “This is a trauma.”

Fear of unknown People first noticed problems with the water’s taste, smell and look after the city switched its supply source from Lake Huron to the Flint River while under control of a state-appointed emergency manager in April 2014.

Corrosion-control chemicals weren’t added to the water treatment process, which caused lead to leach from pipes. The water source was switched back in October but by that point, the water infrastructure had been damaged, so concerns over lead contamination remain.

Part of the anxiety and depression stems from not knowing when the crisis will end and some of it is fear of the unknown, said Danis Russell, CEO of Genesee Health System, whose organization helps with treatment in the community.

Questions run through people’s mind, he said, contributing to the anxiety: Did I drink enough of the water? How much lead did their water have in it? Will it do something to me? Will it do something to my kids?

Should I have been doing more to protect my kids?

“A lot of this isn’t like traditional mental health treatment,” Russell said.

and yogurt provide high amounts of calcium.

Fiber is a key component to a diet at any age. Whole grains such as oatmeal provide the body with fiber as well as B vitamins.

And don’t forget to eat lots of lean proteins.

Lean proteins such as fish and white poultry meat are lower in cholesterol than beef and pork.

No diet would be complete without exercise. It is recommended that seniors from age 50 and up get in 30 minutes of exercise at least five times a week.

This includes low impact aerobics and walking.

B4

WORLD

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

STOJ

Haiti slum undergoing long-awaited makeover Fort National’s transformation comes as 61,302 Haitians continue to live underneath squalid tents, and as Haiti and foreign donors continue to face enormous challenges in providing permanent housing.

BY JACQUELINE CHARLES MIAMI HERALD/TNS

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – At the top of the hill where an old colonial fort overlooks the immaculate grounds of a razed presidential palace, newly built sidewalks and widened alleys lead into new residential communities being shaped by tree-lined courtyards, indoor plumbing and towering condominium-style apartments.

Below, bulldozers move listlessly from one partially built concrete structure to another along a once battered Rue Estime as construction workers beat back scorching heat and hammer as fast as they can.

“Imagine if all of the houses were like this,” Ulrick Gilles, a 40-year-old unemployed husband and father, said from the confines of his newly constructed, government-subsidized, secondfloor apartment in one of this capital’s most quake-ravaged neighborhoods. “Even if you couldn’t call it a paradise, it would still allow people to live better lives.”

PHOTOS BY JACQUELINE CHARLES/MIAMI HERALD/TNS

Fritzner Oriol’s two-story tin shack sits in a courtyard of newly constructed concrete houses in Fort National, Haiti. He says a sister refused to agree to getting the house rebuilt. U.N. hired workers did, however, repair his home.

Fort National’s reconstruction by the parliament as part of the budget, and the no-bid contract was given to a firm owned by powerful Dominican Sen. Felix Bautista.

Co-property law

Funds reallocated

A haphazardly built and volatile slum that foreign donors and international aid groups once shunned, Fort National is getting a long-overdue makeover courtesy of a little-used co-property law that finally allows Haitians like Gilles, who lost his house in the cataclysmic Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, to be homeowners again.

Though the law initially came into existence in 1974 and was strengthened in 2009, it wasn’t until former President Michel Martelly issued more protections in a 2011 executive order that the government and international community dared use it.

“You’re slowly seeing the transformation of a neighborhood,” said Claude-Andre Nadon, senior program manager with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which has built 600 new housing units and repaired more than 1,200 in eight neighborhoods since the earthquake left 1.5 million homeless.

“This place was a disaster zone.”

But 2010 presidential elections would bring chaos and a broken promise. A newly elected Martelly scrapped the Fort National project, and reallocated the funds to initiatives.

Among them: 3,000 units at Morne-a-Carbrit on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince that were so poorly built by one of Bautista’s firms that Belizaire’s housing division refused to accept many of them.

In recent weeks, the original Fort National project has come under scrutiny as a Haiti Senate Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission raises questions about the awards, and Bautista’s relationships with Martelly and some Haitian officials.

Haiti’s Fort National neighborhood overlooks the presidential palace and was one of the hardest-hit communities during the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. The collapsed presidential palace in this 2010 photo has since been razed.

Headed by Sen. Youri Latortue, a one-time Martelly adviser, the probe is supposed to focus on a decade’s worth of government disbursements under Venezuela’s Petrocaribe discounted-oil program. Most of the focus, however, has been on the already investigated Bautista contracts.

Former Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who awarded the Fort National contract to one of Bautista’s firms, has said it was done so legally under an emergency law.

He calls the Senate inquiry a “political witch hunt,” and has accused senators of trying to make him a scapegoat because no one can say what happened to the $174 million, including $22 million he disbursed under Martelly for the homes.

“Do you see 20,000 (new) homes in Fort National?” Bellerive said on Vision 2000 radio station. “That is what I contracted for.”

61,302 in tents Fort National’s transformation comes as 61,302 Haitians continue to live underneath squalid tents, and as Haiti and foreign donors continue to face enormous challenges in providing permanent housing amid dwindling aid dollars and a deepening political crisis.

The country’s failure to replace the 100,000 houses leveled by the quake by all accounts has been the biggest failure of the reconstruction response. Haiti and U.S.-financed housing projects have been slammed for shoddy construction and unaccountable contractors, while both governments also have come under fire for failing to follow through on housing goals.

But if there’s anything close to a model of the lessons learned over the years, it is Fort National. The construction of almost 300 single and condo-style units, installation of street lights and the rehabilitation of water kiosks and streets may seem small.

But supporters note that it’s changing the facade of an informal settlement, and providing employment and training to locals in proper and anti-seismic construction techniques.

“I am not just hiring five guys; I am hiring everyone from the neighborhood,” Nadon said. “So when that guys asks for an extension (on his single unit) he’s going to ask the foreman and that foreman now knows how to do it properly. Their way of building has completely changed.”

‘Change of mentality’ Said Clement Belizaire, executive director of Haiti’s Housing and Public Buildings Construction Unit: “The housing is very nice; well-built. The engineering? A-plus. But the real success of Fort National and everything that

Probe of contracts

For the past two years, the United Nations Office for Project Services has built new earthquakeresistant homes in Haiti’s quake-ravaged Fort National neighborhood. The $20 million in funding from Canada, the U.N. and other donors has run out. has had to do with housing is the change of mentality.”

Nadon and his team first visited National in 2011. They spent three years negotiating with gang leaders and community residents to launch the project, and then with skeptical residents to give up their plots and shacks — sometimes barely larger than a bedroom — in exchange for decent corridors, public spaces and a 376-squarefoot apartment.

“In lot of cases people didn’t want to move,” he said. “All would say, ‘Haitians don’t like living on the second floor; they don’t want to live together.’”

Need space Eventually, many would agree.

Some would even donate as much as 80 percent of their land back to the community in order to allow the chaotic landscape of vacant

plots and sweltering tin and tarpcovered shacks to be transformed.

“Haitians are no different from a guy in Miami or Canada. They want to live in a decent home,” Nadon said. “(Eventually) they understood that in order to have something like this, you need space. You need space to put septic tanks, you need space to have water pipes coming in, you need space to have the trees. After a while they get it.”

Belizaire, the housing czar, said the co-property law makes a lot of sense in a densely populated Haiti, but “the social mobilization to get people to think rationally and not selfishly” is quite a challenge.

“We’re living in the city and we want to live in rural mode,” he said. “Everybody wants to have their own yard; everybody wants to have their own house; nobody wants to share walls with neigh-

bors. When you share a wall, you cut the costs. We have to start thinking multilevel housing.”

Celestin’s concept The concept first surfaced months after the quake when then-President Rene Preval vowed to rebuild Fort National.

Preval dispatched government bulldozers to remove rubble.

He also asked international aid organizations to re-direct cashfor-work dollars to the slum, and he tapped the head of his state construction agency — and eventual presidential pick — Jude Celestin to build two-by-three-feet wide units for 6,000 displaced families.

Celestin, an engineer who is once more seeking the presidency, proposed constructing multistory apartments instead. Some $174 million was approved for

‘Endless’ needs Unfortunately, the project is nearing its end even as the needs remain “endless,” Belizaire said, because the $20 million in funding from Canada, the U.N. and two other donors has run out. Despite Haitians reluctance to share a wall, he said, the government is finding success with multistory dwellings.

Similar constructions were done in the low-income communities of Morne Hercule and Morne Lazarre. The U.N. first applied the co-property law in Morne Lazarre to build three-story condominiums.

“Fort National benefited from what we did in Morne Hercule and Morne Lazarre,” Belizaire said, hoping donors keep the revitalization going.

“There’s a big difference between showing somebody something on a nice layout plan, 3-D designs and pictures and when you actually take the people, put them on a bus and bring them to … talk to the beneficiaries.”

STOJ

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

FINEST & ENTERTAINMENT

Meet some of

FLORIDA’S

finest

submitted for your approval

Daryl Homer made a historic win in the Olympics for Team USA earlier this month when he won the silver medal in men’s sabre fencing. He became the first American to take home the award in 112 years.

ROBERT GAUTHIER/LOS ANGELES TIMES/TNS

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.

Boxer Claressa Shields was crowned as a two-time gold medal Olympic champion on Aug. 21. Shields, who is from Flint, Michigan, earned the gold medal at this year’s Olympics and at the 2012 London Olympics. She is the first U.S. boxer to ever win consecutive Olympic gold medals.

WALLY SKALIJ/LOS ANGELES TIMES/TNS

1999 rape case still shadows actor Nate Parker, who was acquitted, is catching flak for intense promotional campaign of his new movie.

“I understand how much confusion and pain this incident has had on so many, most importantly the young woman who was involved,” Parker said in a lengthy Facebook post about the case.

“I myself just learned that the young woman ended her own life several years ago and I am filled with profound sorrow.”

Parker has maintained his innocence in the case, and Fox Searchlight, the company distributing his film, has also issued a statement in support of him.

“Searchlight is aware of the incident that occurred while Nate Parker was at Penn State,” the studio said in a statement. “We also know that he was found innocent and cleared of all charges. We stand behind Nate and are proud to help bring this important and powerful story to the screen.”

BY REBECCA KEEGAN LOS ANGELES TIMES/TNS

When Nate Parker premiered his provocative drama about the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the audience response was electric.

After a fierce bidding war, Fox Searchlight acquired “The Birth of a Nation” for a record $17.5 million, and Parker, a first-time director, seemed to be barreling toward Oscar season with an air of inevitability.

Instead, a complex and tragic chapter from Parker’s past has placed the 36-year-old writer, director and star of “The Birth of a Nation” at the center of a roiling controversy over sexual assault.

Praise for film

Details of case In 1999, while a scholarship wrestler at Penn State University, Parker was accused and acquitted of raping a woman. His roommate, Jean McGianni Celestin, who received a writing credit on the movie, was convicted in the case, but the verdict was overturned.

Parker had previously discussed the case in interviews, but many in Hollywood first learned of the story in recent days due to articles in the trade press that included harrowing new details about the case.

Deadline has posted the trial transcripts, which contain the woman’s allegation that she was unconscious during the encounter, and Variety reported that she committed suicide in 2012 at age 30, which Parker said he did not know.

Promotions continue Many expected the filmmaker to withdraw from an intensive promotional campaign for the film. But in defiance of the con-

JENNIFER GRAYLOCK/SIPA USA/TNS

Nate Parker arrives at the 2016 Met Gala, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opening of Manus x Machina Fashion in an Age of Technology, on May 2 in New York City. ventional strategy that public figures take a break from appearances when such a story erupts, Parker seems determined to stay in the public eye and face whatever uncomfortable questions arise.

Although the studio declined to make him available for comment for this story, he appeared at a film festival in Martha’s Vineyard for a question-and-answer

session moderated by Spike Lee and is scheduled to attend a series of events in the weeks before the film is released Oct. 7, including the Toronto Film Festival and a press junket.

Maintains innocence Plans for a 12-city tour, which involves speaking to community groups and churches, are still in place.

“Birth of a Nation” premiered to a rapturous standing ovation at Sundance in January, just as a controversy over an all-White slate of acting nominees rocked the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, prompting drastic rule changes designed to increase inclusion at the organization.

At the time, critics praised Parker’s film for its portrait of racial catharsis, and many in Hollywood hoped it would serve as a step forward in the ongoing debate about diversity in the film business.

Just seven months later, it seems clear Parker and his film will, instead, walk through a thicket of inflammatory social issues, as evolving views about sexual assault on college campuses collide with the long, deadly history of rape accusations against Black men.

High-profile case Parker’s story has also come to light in a moment when accusations about sexual assault and harassment are being treated with a new seriousness, even in a case that results in acquittal.

Outrage over a six-month sentence for a Stanford University athlete convicted of assaulting an

unconscious woman, and highprofile cases involving Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes have heightened sensitivities.

In 2001, the accuser, who was a White Penn State student, told the campus paper the Daily Collegian that she withdrew from the university after “harassment and endless threats I received.”

“What has been happening culturally in the last couple years with people finally, finally, talking about sexual assault and taking it seriously, we’ve never seen this happen before,” said Kristen Houser, chief public affairs officer for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

Other controversies In previous controversies around filmmakers, audiences and academy members have already had a relationship with the artist, such as those surrounding Woody Allen, accused of rape by his daughter, Dylan Farrow, during the 2013-2014 awards campaign for the movie “Blue Jasmine,” and Roman Polanski, who could not travel to the U.S. during the 2002-2003 campaign for “The Pianist” because he still faced charges of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

But Parker, who has appeared in the films “Beyond the Lights,” “Red Tails” and “The Great Debaters,” is a new face to many moviegoers and to members of the film academy.

Parker’s film engages some of the very same issues that are surrounding him — “Birth of a Nation” includes a scene involving the rape of a female character, and another where Turner, who is played by Parker, is harshly reprimanded for talking with a White woman.

Prior to Parker’s case coming into the spotlight, one of the film’s actresses, Gabrielle Union, a rape survivor, has spoken at film festival panels and to reporters about what she considers the movie’s poignant treatment of the issue.

Times staff writer Libby Hill contributed to this report.

B6

FOOD

AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

S

SWEET SHORTCUTS FROM FAMILY FEATURES

No matter the season or the reason, no party is complete without dessert. The trick to making the most out of your celebrations is finding ways to trim your kitchen time so you can enjoy the festivities, without sacrificing quality or flavor in your favorite sweet treats.

Many dessert recipes require multiple time-consuming steps, but using canned fruit can help cut down on prep work and provide you and your guests with a refreshing, delicious treat.

In addition to baked recipes, canned fruit is also well-suited for other desserts, such as fruit salads, baked muffins and breads, or even as a dessert topping.

Find more tips for your next gathering from the expert chefs at Dole Packaged Foods’ test kitchen at dolesunshine.com.

FABULOUS CARROT CAKE Prep time: 15 minutes Total time: 40 minutes Servings: 16 1 1/2 cups butter, softened, divided 1 cup packed brown sugar 1 cup granulated sugar 4 eggs 1 can (20 ounces) Dole Crushed Pineapple, drained 4 cups shredded carrots 1 cup Dole Seedless Raisins 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 3 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking soda 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground ginger 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, softened 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar 1 teaspoon grated lemon peel 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Heat oven to 350 F. Grease and flour two (9-inch) round pans.

In large bowl, beat 1 cup butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs. Fold in crushed pineapple, carrots, raisins and vanilla.

In medium bowl, stir together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger and salt. Gradually add to pineapple mixture and fold until well-blended.

Pour into prepared pans.

Bake 35-40 minutes, or until toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Cool in pans 15 minutes. Remove from pans; cool completely on wire racks.

Beat cream cheese with remaining 1/2 cup butter until smooth. Beat in powdered sugar, lemon peel and lemon juice until smooth. Frost completely cooled cake. Garnish with additional crushed pineapple and grated carrots, if desired.

Note: Cake can be baked in 13-by-9-inch pan. Bake 50-60 minutes at 350 F. Cool completely in pan on wire rack.

OLD-FASHIONED UPSIDE DOWN CAKE Prep time: 20 minutes Total time: 35 minutes Servings: 8 2/3 cup margarine, divided 2/3 cup packed brown sugar, divided 1 can (20 ounces) Dole Pineapple Slices 10 maraschino cherries 3/4 cup granulated sugar, divided 2 eggs, separated 1 teaspoon grated lemon peel 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup sour cream Heat oven to 350 F.

In 10-inch cast-iron skillet, melt 1/3 cup margarine.

Remove from heat. Add brown sugar and stir until blended.

Drain pineapple slices; reserve 2 tablespoons syrup.

Arrange pineapple slices in sugar mixture. Place cherry in center of each slice.

Beat remaining 1/3 cup margarine with 1/2 cup granu­lated sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg yolks, lemon peel, lemon juice and vanilla. Combine flour, baking powder and salt. Blend into creamed mixture alternately with sour cream and reserved pineapple syrup.

Beat egg whites to soft peaks. Gradually beat in remain­ing 1/4 cup granulated sugar to make stiff meringue.

Fold into batter. Pour over pineapple in skillet.

Bake 35 minutes, or until toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let stand 10 minutes then invert onto serving plate.

Serve warm or cold.

EASY IDEAS FOR AWARD-WINNING DESSERTS

CHOCOLATE MANDARIN ORANGE CAKE Prep time: 10 minutes Total time: 45 minutes Servings: 12 2 cans (15 ounces) Dole Mandarin Oranges, divided 1 box (2 layer) devil’s food cake mix 3 eggs 1/2 cup vegetable oil 1 orange, peel grated (optional) 1 package (4-serving size) vanilla flavor instant pudding 2 cups frozen whipped topping, thawed 1 cup heavy whipping cream 1 cup semisweet chocolate Heat oven to 350 F. Spray two (9-inch) cake pans with cooking spray.

Drain mandarin oranges, keeping fruit and syrup reserved separately.

In large bowl, combine cake mix, juice from one can of mandarin oranges, eggs, oil and orange peel; beat 2 minutes.

Pour cake mix into prepared pans.

Layer mandarin oranges from one can over each cake and gently submerge them into cake batter.

Bake 25-30 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes.

Remove from pan onto wire rack; cool completely.

Pour 1/2 cup reserved juice from second can of oranges in bowl with pudding mix; whisk 2 minutes, or until pudding mix is completely dissolved.

Remove 12 orange slices from second can and dry with paper towel; set aside.

Fold in whipped topping and remaining mandarin oranges. Spread mandarin frosting on top of first layer of cake and out to edges. Place second layer on top of first layer.

In small saucepan, heat cream until just beginning to steam, but do not boil. Remove from stove and stir in chocolate. Stir until well-blended. Pour chocolate mixture over cake and garnish with reserved mandarin oranges.

Refrigerate half hour before serving.

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to be on your list today.