INSIGHT NEWS August 15 - August 21, 2011 • MN Metro Vol. 37 No. 33 • The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • www.insightnews.com
WE WIN & Zion Baptist Church garden By Titilayo Bediako WE WIN Institute has a commitment to teaching youth about the importance of healthy food and healthy eating. This is the second year that children at WE WIN Institute have taken part in all aspects of growing food at their urban garden. Anyone driving or riding their bikes in north Minneapolis on Olson Highway, can see the church on the hill with corn, cauliflower, broccoli, peppers, pumpkins, strawberries,
squash, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, egg plant and so much more; growing abundantly. “Look at how tall the corn is,” says an elder about the five-foot corn, in the garden in front of Zion Baptist Church. Congressmen Keith Ellison said, “The WE WIN garden is contributing to ecological movement that is taking place in our country.” He continued to talk about the importance of the urban garden movement.
MARKET TURN TO 12 Titilayo Bediako
Above: Tiffany McGowan, Brandie Hill, Lailah Wright, Jaylea Wright and Ellanah Wright
Part 1 of 2: Conversations with Al McFarlane broadcast interview
New pioneers in multicultural marketing Al McFarlane: We believe we have to be responsible for telling our own story, projecting our definition of who we are, and declaring the centrality of our existence both to ourselves and to the world. We must identify our interests and argue the best outcomes for our families. It is incumbent upon us in the arena of business and economic development, in the arena of marketing to show that we can and do connect, creating collaborations that make sense. I started my career as a newspaper man. I am a former reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. I launched Insight News as a magazine in 1974, working for a printing company that owned a suite of industry magazines. I
Suluki Fardan
Ivan Phifer
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bought Insight and re-launched in 1976 under my own company. Over the years, we have emerged as the leading ethnic
newspaper in the marketplace. We have discovered that the challenge is to find ways to collaborate. The
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principle that has guided our success and our development is our ability to reach out to other publishers, communicators, media companies
across ethnic and geographic lines and say, ‘You know what, we are all small businesses. We have the same challenges. How
can we collaborate? How can we partner, connect and find value, deliver value to the marketplace? We created a group called the Minnesota Multicultural Media Consortium. That Consortium now has evolved to where it has a relationship with the University of Minnesota, a wonderful and powerful training relationship where we are conducting a $3.9 million Broadband access and adoption initiative. It is a 3-year project designed to introduce and connect communities of color, African, African American, Asian Latino, and Native American communities to internet technology, to high-speed internet and to the
Q&A TURN TO 2
Jackie Robinson: A relentless competitor By Abeni Hill abeni@insightnews.com On August 8, 2011, Sharon Robinson, the daughter of Jackie Robinson, visited the Twin Cities and was a guest speaker at Hallie Q Brown Community Center, 270 N. Kent Street, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55102. Hallie Q Brown is an 82-year old organization founded by community leaders in the 1920s. Robinson gave a personal view about her father and how he broke the color barrier in major league baseball. She also had a slide show of photographs and drawings from her children’s book—Testing the Ice. Robinson was introduced by Frank White, a fan of Jackie Robinson, and whose own coach Howie Shultz was replaced by Jackie Robinson. White met Robinson at an event for Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI), an organization
that strives to get more inner city children involved in baseball and softball. Robinson acknowledged several people in the audience. One of them was a man name Ronnie Rabinovitz, who as a little boy had exchanged letters with Jackie Robinson; then playing for the Dodgers. A young woman in the audience was a winner of the Breaking Barriers Essay Contest—a national essay contest that allows children in grades 4–8 to express and tell personal stories and how they used Jackie Robinson’s values (courage, determination, teamwork, persistence, integrity, citizenship, justice, commitment and excellence) to overcome obstacles in their lives. Robinson said she was really happy to spend some time with her and meet her family. Of her father’s early childhood, Robinson said that he was the youngest of five
The Riverfront
A new view of North Minneapolis
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John Vecchiolla
Sharon Robinson
children and had an absent father. Young Jackie Robinson along with his mother and siblings lived in the Deep South during the summer of 1929— the ‘bloody summer’ of many lynchings. His mother fearing for the lives of her young sons during the bloody summer moved the family to Pasadena,
Aesthetics
Erica Gluck and Young Marcus
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California to live with her brother. While in school the baseball star participated in almost every sport. He set records in track events, basketball, and baseball in high school. Later he attended the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) but dropped out in the second semester of his senior year. Robinson said he stopped attending because the school wasn’t offering him financial aid anymore and because he felt as a black man whether he had a college degree or not wasn’t important. Robinson also made mention of the achievements of Mack Robinson her uncle. He was silver medalist in the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics and ran second to Jesse Owens. According to his daughter, Jackie Robinson was very active in the Civil Rights Movement and would hold jazz concerts at his house to raise
money for the movement. “I remember my siblings and I giving up our bedrooms so that musicians could change their clothes.” Many greats, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and others, performed at these concerts. Robinson admitted that she didn’t know much about her father’s baseball career from personal experience and memory. “I learned about my father’s career after he retired or through my own research.” The only way she knew she was present at a game when she was 6 years old, is a photograph. One of the photos in the PowerPoint slide show had Robinson and her family in front of their house in Connecticut. There were many boulders in front of the house, which she and her siblings used for the bases and home plate in their family baseball games. The Robinsons loved to play all types of games. “We liked
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to play card games and board games after dinner. Every game my father played, he played to win. So we would have long nights of Monopoly and cards. My father would love to play with us outside—as long as it didn’t include getting into the lake by our house.” Robinson’s fondest memory of her father was a coffee shop called Chock o’ Nuts, and when he would take her shopping for dresses. “There was a whole-sale designer named, Mr. Love and he only designed little girl’s dresses. I would be escorted around to look at these beautiful dresses around the store.” Robinson said she adored her father and they were very close. “We were thick as thieves. There were only two things he wouldn’t let me have, a cat and a poster of Huey P. Newton.”
ROBINSON TURN TO 12
Lifestyle
Watching anything good this summer
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