Insight ::: 08.21.2023

Editor’s Note: Development and Engagement Strategist

Anthony Taylor was guest host for last Tuesday’s edition of The Conversation with Al McFarlane, the daily YouTube/Facebook/ Twitter/ LinkedIn livestream show.

Taylor interviewed Chadwick “Niles” Phillips, impresario par excellence, who reprises the On the One Music Festival this weekend at Normandale Lake Bandshell in Bloomington.

In partnership with the City of Bloomington, the festive elevates the presence and power of Black genius… this year in a musical tribute to Erykah Badu and Jill Scott. Here is excerpt of the excellent conversation.

Anthony Taylor: You’re doing art. You’re doing production. You’re creating music online. You’re cultivating community and collaborative artists. Talk about how you got to here, because I think it really is pretty special.

Chadwick “Niles” Phillips:

By Myracle Lewis, Amelia Gabor and Birdie O’Connell

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series. (LSU Manship School News Service) — Beverly Shabazz did not have a job and was seven months pregnant with her second child when her husband, Milton X Scott, was shot and killed outside their home in 1973 by FBI agents attempting to arrest him.

“I was thinking I have these two kids to raise,” she said. “I don’t have any help from their father, and it was a while before I could adjust to the situation.”

Shabazz depended on Social Security benefits for their children and then went back to school so she could work as both a cosmetologist and an elementary school teacher. As they grew up, the children hardly saw her, and they missed the emotional support and stability that their father could have provided.

It was a loss compounded by the fact that the shooting arose from a case of mistaken identity. The FBI agents had thought Scott was an Army deserter, and the fatal battle outside his door would not have happened if they had known

Well, my father is the longest-tenured AfricanAmerican in the United States Symphony Orchestra. His name is Sam Gill. Bassist. He came up with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk. And my mom is a visual artist and fashion guru. At birth, I had the genetics in me to love music and to love the arts. And as time went on, my curiosity made me become an artist. I’m a Hip-Hop artist. I have an album out right now called To Remain. I graduated from Michigan State University with a bachelor’s in communications. I moved to New York, where I ended up winning a talent search that HOT 97 put on with Koch Records. That was a major label at the time. So I released a single on Koch. I worked at BET, CBS, and New York City Fashion Week. Going down these different avenues in the music and film industry inspired me to create my own lane where I see music and the arts providing opportunities for others. I moved here to the Twin Cities, starting

from scratch and building brick by brick to today, where I am the CEO of The Avant Garde Music Arts and Entertainment Production Company. And I’m the founder of the Hip-Hop, History, and the Arts Youth Artist Development Program.

Taylor: We celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop. What is current generation contribution to Hip-Hop and what’s coming out of the Twin Cities?

Phillips: The lane that catches my attention the most is the one that has to do with consciousness, empowerment, uplift, and healing, and that’s what Hip-Hop has always been about. It’s an offspring of the civil rights movement, the soul music uprising of the 60s. The early 80s, you had The Last Poets who played a big role in the creation of Hip-Hop. So when I think of the lineage of Hip-Hop from The Last Poets, to Rakim, to Common,

to Kendrick Lamar, you have different people carrying that torch. When it’s used in a positive way and inspirational way, it’s most powerful. It’s become a global force to the point where it’s being taught in colleges.

I teach a curriculum called Hip-Hop, History, and the Arts that I’ve taught in places from the University of Minnesota to St. Peter Claver Middle School and High School for Recording Arts. Local artists from Maria Isa, to Nakara Forje, to Louis Blaze, to Juice Lord, are carrying on the torch just as much as the Queen Latifahs and the Nas’. This is a music town. We have people like Prince, Jimmy Jim and Terry Lewis, Jermaine Brooks, Kathleen Johnson, who came out of here. Being a Hip-Hop artist representing the culture, and this being its 50th year, is an honor. It’s a blessing. I came here in my last year of high school. I went

Living relatives of Henrietta Lacks have reached a confidential settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, the multi-billion-dollar biotechnology company that has used regenerative cells taken from Lacks decades ago without her consent.

The settlement sets a precedent, potentially leading to complaints seeking compensation and control of Lacks’ cells, famously known as “HeLa” cells, the world’s first cells capable of replicating outside the human body.

Represented jointly by attorney Ben Crump, renowned for his advocacy for Black victims of police violence, and attorney Chris Seeger, known for leading significant class action lawsuits in U.S. history, the family called a news conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, August 1st, which coincides with what would have been Lacks’ 103rd birthday.

“The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of court and will have no further comment about the settlement,” Crump and Seeger wrote in a news release.

The Lacks family’s lawsuit addressed a problem that had persisted for 70 years following the unlawful removal of Henrietta Lacks’ cells while she was receiving cervical cancer treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The family argued

that the cells rightfully belong to Lacks and that companies like Thermo Fisher Scientific should pay for using them in research and product development. In a 2022 interview, Crump called the situation “indicative of the Black struggle for equality and respect in America.

“Because it’s a racial justice issue when you think about it in the purest form,” Crump asserted. “The children of Henry Ford, they’re able to benefit from his contributions to the world.”

Thermo Fisher Scientific, in its defense, contended that Lacks’ descendants waited too long to take legal action and that other companies worldwide also use HeLa cells without the family’s consent. Lacks’ cancer treatment in 1951 was unsuccessful, and she tragically succumbed to the disease a few months after her diagnosis. Following her death, researchers at Johns

he had never been in the Army.

“The toughest day of my life happened before I was even born,” his son, Milton Scott Jr., said recently.

When he was little, Scott said, none of the other children believed him when he said that his father was killed by the FBI before he was born. The mockery so traumatized him that he kept quiet about it until George Floyd was murdered in police custody in 2020, intensifying concerns about Black men killed by law-enforcement officers and the impact on their families.

“I didn’t get to grow up with either parent because my mom always had two jobs, and she was in college,” Shabazz’s daughter, Andrea Grant, said. Grant, now 52 and a college admissions coordinator, said she and her brother, a businessman in Atlanta, were largely raised by their grandparents.

“I regret that my father never got to meet his grandkids,” Grant said, and “the fact that he will never be able to see all that Milton and I have accomplished.”

Floyd’s death, along with the deaths of others like Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling and Daunte Wright, show how in the years since Scott’s death, officer-involved shootings have continued to

haunt Black communities and rupture families. While some of these cases resulted in discipline or convictions for officers, others – like Scott’s – ended in the officers’ actions being deemed justifiable. Experts say that regardless of the legal outcome, families have to deal with the agony of losing a loved one and often a loss of income, which can compound the pain.

According to Russell Jones, an emeritus professor at Southern University Law Center, these incidents also escalate a distrust of law enforcement and induce resentment.

“The common thread within all of these incidents is that we don’t have that same right that the white society has to protect our homes,” Jones said.

One POTUS, four indictments, 91 charges!

Former FBI agents Delbert Hahn and William Wood also struggled with the aftermath of Scott’s death. They had been sent to arrest Scott, a Black Muslim, who charged the officers after they kicked in the front door of his home. During the struggle, Hahn shot Scott twice when he thought Scott had taken Wood’s gun only to learn afterward that Scott had picked up Hahn’s blackjack.

Wood recently said that Scott’s shooting caused him to suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder.

Twenty years after the shooting, Wood taught a PTSD class at the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia,

There was a time, not so long ago actually, when the Republican Party proudly called itself the “Party of Personal Responsibility.”

Oh, how the Grand Old Party has steadily fallen!

With the latest unsealed indictment, this time in Atlanta, Georgia, one Donald John Trump, the 45th President of the United States, is facing a combined grand total of 712 years in prison— and six months to boot—after calculating his maximum exposure to the 91 criminal counts that hang over his head like the Sword of Damocles!

Whether Trump will get convicted in each case, let

alone each count, is unknown at this time. But what is known is that the entire Republican notion of “personal responsibility” was and remains rank sophistry in that back when Ronald Reagan was popularizing the phrase, he was doing so to cast aspersions against poor people, particularly poor Black and Brown people, who he and his ilk deemed “Welfare Queens” and “Poverty Pimps” juxtaposed to the “hard working” (read-white) folks all across America. The same holds true today, as it disgusts me to no end to hear white Republicans, and their Black and Latino lackeys, criticize prosecutors for not going after “violent thugs” and gang members.

In fact, the Reagan era Republicans repeated the “personal responsibility” phrase so much that it still rings in my head as I watch the heir to his legacy, Donald Trump, rack up his fourth criminal indictment—91 criminal charges in all—from as far

Donald John Trump, the 45th President of the United States, is facing a combined grand total of 712 years in prison.

TP Photo Studio

Chadwick “Niles” Phillips

Artist, entrepreneur Chadwick “Niles” Phillips promotes

Henrietta Lacks’ family settles lawsuit with biotech company, paving the way for more claims, says Attorney Ben Crump

Henrietta Lacks

By Chuck Hobbs

Photo courtesy of the Scott family

According to Milton Scott’s widow, Beverly (Scott) Shabazz, Milton Scott was an artist who loved listening to jazz music and his favorite musician, Jimi Hendrix.

Contributing Writers, Louisiana Weekly

IN MEMORIAM: Business leader, mentor and music business legend Clarence Avant dies 92

Clarence Avant, a music business icon and mentor to many, has died at 92 years old. Avant was called “The Godfather” by many because of his long reach in the business community and his ability to bring all sides together in negotiations.

“The Godfather” has left us. This man was singularly responsible for helping so many Black artists get paid their worth. Also was a wonderful supporter & former board member of ⁦@NAACP_

LDF. Rest in Peace & Power

#ClarenceAvant,” wrote attorney Sherrilyn Ifill on social media. Avant was born in North Carolina in 1931. He went on in the business to promote and manage Sarah Vaughan and discovered Bill Withers. Avant also promoted Michael Jackson as he laughed on his first tour as a solo artist. Avant, along with his wife, Jacquline, were the subjects of the Netflix feature, The Black Godfather.

Tragically, Jacquline Avant, at 81, Clarence Avant’s wife of 54 years, was murdered during a burglary in the early morning hours of December 1, 2021, in the couple’s home in Beverly Hills. The murder

was was a home invasion in the wealthy Trousdale Estates area of Beverly Hills. Clarence and Jacqueline Avant married in 1967 “He’s a deal maker,

he’s the best in the business,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., in the documentary of Clarence. Several participants in the documentary referred

to Jacqueline as a key to Clarence’s success. The Avant’s children, Nicole and Alexander were also featured in the Netflix documentary. Nicole Avant is married to Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos. A statement was released by the family:

“It is with a heavy heart that the Avant/Sarandos family announce the passing of Clarence Alexander Avant,” the statement from his children, Nicole and Alexander and sonin-law Ted Sarandos. “Through his revolutionary business leadership, Clarence became affectionately known as ‘the Black Godfather’ in the worlds of music, entertainment, politics,

and sports. Clarence leaves behind a loving family and a sea of friends and associates that have changed the world and will continue to change the world for generations to come. The joy of his legacy eases the sorrow of our loss. Clarence passed away gently at home in Los Angeles on Sunday, August 13, 2023.” Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent investigative journalist and the publisher of Black Virginia News. She is a political analyst who appears regularly on #RolandMartinUnfiltered. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke

to Park Center. I’ve always had family here. My aunt Cynthia Wilson, is the president of the

The

Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. I played for University of Minnesota’s basketball team. I used to visit here when I was younger, hooping at North Commons. I was on the music scene at 17, winning rap battles, developing my craft. My program is about bringing a whole other level

of leisure. What having a good time looks like to me when I go out… I want to hear Tribe Called Quest, I want to hear Erykah Badu, things of that nature. It’s an amazing thing because you realize a lot of people who love this type of music are sometimes looked at as a subculture. That’s what The Avant Garde is all about.

Taylor: This weekend’s event?

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Phillips: The Avant Garde is putting on our second annual music festival called On the One. On the One used to be an open mic event at Pimento Kitchen that ran for seven months. Everyone would come there. It was packed out, even

when it was -3-degree weather. Packed. It was beautiful. Then the pandemic hit. And then the idea came to mind to expand it into a festival, and here we are. It’s at the Normandale Lake Bandshell on 5901 West 84th Street, Bloomington, Minnesota. It’s a part of a partnership initiative between the city of Bloomington and The Avant Garde. Bloomington is rapidly growing in the diverse trajectory, and I got contacted by representative, shout-out to Faith Jackson, who’s a big part of the new movement in Bloomington. And, we were able to create this festival. This is the second year. Last year, we had Jamecia Bennett, Ashley Dubose, and International Reggae All Stars as the headliners. This

year, we’re doing an Erykah Badu and Jill Scott Tribute by Jamela Pettiford, who is a St. Paul legend, Minnesota music legend, soul artist, and Ashley Dubose, who made it far on The Voice. Everybody knows Ashley. The festival represents Black music across the diaspora. So you’re going to get R&B, neo soul, reggae, Afro beat, HipHop, spoken word, and jazz. It’s bringing all corners of the music scene together as one, hence On the One. It’ll be Saturday, August 26th, Normandale Lake Bandshell in Bloomington, Noon to 8:00 PM. Come vibe with us.

Taylor: All right. So one more time, give us the date, the time, and the place for the event.

Gold Medal posthumously.

Phillips: Indeed. The On the One Music Festival, Saturday, August 26th from noon to 8:00 PM. It’ll be at the Normandale Lake Bandshell on 5901 West 84th Street, Bloomington, Minnesota. We’re celebrating Black music across the diaspora: R&B, neo soul, Afrobeat, jazz, Hip-Hop, reggae, spoken word. And it’ll be headlined by Ashley Dubose and Jamela Pettiford, putting on a once-in-a-lifetime performance that is giving homage to the queens of neo soul, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott. And we have a lot of amazing openers within those genres. Come out, it’s free of charge, all ages. We’d love to have you all. It’s going to be incredible.

Hopkins discovered that the cells sampled from Lacks’ cervix could regenerate outside the human body.

They shared those groundbreaking cells, which were instrumental in developing polio and COVID-19 vaccines and the world’s most common fertility treatment. Crump has noted that

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and invited Hahn, believing he would benefit from it.

“It became personal for me,” Hahn said in an interview with the LSU Cold Case Project. He said the FBI “stuck me in a position where something awful happened, and they didn’t have to do that.”

Hahn said the workshop helped him because he and Wood had never had an in-depth conversation with each other about the incident.

Multiple investigations Hours after the shooting, the FBI realized that Scott’s identity had been stolen and found the thief,

other companies besides Thermo Fisher Scientific sell Lacks’ cells, and biotech companies and labs globally use them for various types of research. The family has signaled that they also may act against those companies. For decades, Lacks’ contributions to science remained unrecognized.

However, Maryland Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume and fellow Maryland Democrats U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin have introduced legislation seeking to award Lacks a Congressional

Calvin Wallace, in prison in California. Wallace had juggled at least five stolen aliases in committing various misdemeanors and felonies.

Wallace told the FBI that he had met Scott when Scott was on a trip to California in the early 1970s. Wallace pried into Scott’s background and learned his date of birth, the name of his parents and his Social Security number. Wallace was able to recite the number to agents, missing only one digit.

Wallace lived a transient life. When a childhood acquaintance, Robert King, saw him more than 20 years ago in San Diego, he said Wallace showed signs of heroin addiction. Wallace, then 82, died last October in a San Diego nursing home. Black leaders demanded investigations into

The lawmakers said the goal is to ensure her contributions are honored and acknowledged for generations, as the cells she unknowingly provided continue to benefit millions worldwide.

Lacks’ story has since become a best-selling book and, in 2017, Oprah Winfrey starred in the big screen biopic, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

“It’s a real honor to have a family member that’s genetic makeup is that important to the world,”

Scott’s death, which came just eight months after an East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy had killed two Black students at Southern University.

Emmett Douglas, then the president of the Louisiana NAACP, questioned how two trained FBI agents could not subdue a man weighing less than 180 pounds without shooting him. Neither of the agents was suspended as federal and state authorities looked into what happened.

J. Stanley Pottinger, then the assistant U.S. general attorney for civil rights, instructed the FBI to conduct a preliminary civil rights investigation.

FBI documents say that the bureau did not request an interview with Shabazz shortly after the shooting

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Lacks’ grandson, Ron Lacks, said in an earlier interview.

“When people are profiting from her, and some of my family members can’t even afford proper medical [care], you know, it’s like she’s on the auction block,” he said.

“You know, as loving as my grandmother was, she would have definitely said, ‘Well, what about her family?’” The post Henrietta Lacks’ Family Settles Lawsuit with Biotech Company, Paving the Way for More Claims, Says Attorney Ben Crump appeared first on Forward Times.

because she had seemed hostile.

“Well, I was upset because of the way they treated him. I wanted to tell my story, but I never got the chance to,” Shabazz said recently.

The FBI chose not to talk to many neighbors since the area, bureau documents said, was frequented by Nation of Islam members. Authorities feared that would worsen racial tensions and lead to more confrontations like one on North Boulevard 19 months earlier that led to the death of two police officers and two Black men.

A city sanitation worker gave the FBI a signed statement saying he saw a Black man pushing two white men off the porch of Scott’s house before a car blocked his vision of the fight. Seconds later he heard two shots fired.

Two other sanitation workers and one of Scott’s neighbors only noticed what was happening after the shots rang out, and bureau investigators determined that the agents had shot Scott in self-defense.

On Nov. 19, 1973, an East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury also chose not to bring charges against the agents.

One of the jurors, Baton Rouge native George Kilcrease, still believes the agents acted in good faith.

“In hindsight, maybe they could have approached it a little differently, he said, but “all the facts of the case led the jury to conclude that they acted reasonably. If Mr. Scott would’ve been white or Black, I don’t think that played into the FBI’s actions of that day.”

Shabazz’s legal struggles

Shabazz also sought redress in a civil case.

In May 1974, she hired Baton Rouge attorney Walter Dumas, who filed a $1 million lawsuit against the FBI under the Federal Tort Claims Act, claiming that Scott’s death was a “direct and proximate result of the negligence, carelessness, and unlawful conduct.”

Dumas did not respond to a request for comment. Shabazz also hired other lawyers, but the case was eventually dismissed by U.S. District Judge Gordon West, who noted that her complaints continually gave the impression that the FBI agents shot and killed the wrong man.

“This is not so,” he wrote. “They shot and

killed the man they intended to shoot and kill. They did not shoot the man because he was a deserter from the Army but because he physically attacked and attempted to destroy the two FBI agents.”

Justice Department officials spoke with Scott’s family in 2020 after Congress encouraged the department to investigate a wider range of cold cases from the civil rights era. But the case was closed again in September 2021.

With the grand jury’s decision not to indict, the failure of Shabazz’s lawsuits in civil court and the FBI’s decision to close its new investigation, the family finds memories of Scott and the opportunity to tell his story as the best way to honor him today.

Shabazz later

remarried and still lives in Baton Rouge. Now 75, she said Scott had made her “proud to be Black” and “proud to be a Black woman. I was proud of my Black husband.”

Trump

From 3

north as New York to as far south as the 45th president’s adopted South Florida home. Predictably, the old “Party of Personal Responsibility” continues in its modern version as the “Party of Personal Deflection,” as few prominent party members are willing to call Trump out for his own criminal conduct during the waning days of his administration.

Party members like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who, last night, went on Fox News’ Sean Hannity Show right after the latest indictments were unsealed and yelled, “I’m pissed,” before adding, right on cue, that “President Joe Biden is weaponizing the justice system because they are afraid of the voters.”

Yeah, ok, Teddy...

You see, Ted Cruz,

‘I’m sorry for her and her family’

On the day of Scott’s death, FBI agents Hahn and Wood were treated at the hospital for minor injuries. When Hahn returned home, he did not tell his wife anything.

“I remember I had blood on the suit, mostly mine,” he said. “I took it off and stuffed it under the bed. It was there for a year.”

Retired FBI agent Theodore “Ted” Jackson, a Black agent who had investigated the shooting at Southern University months before the Scott shooting, said it is important for law-enforcement officers to talk things out after troubling events, especially a fatal shooting.

They never know what the day will bring, but “they all want to go home to their families” after work, Jackson said.

Hahn, now 89, said he believes the bureau should have performed a thorough background check before assigning the deserter case to him. In fact, the FBI, which had earlier quit checking fingerprints of deserters, quickly returned to that practice after Scott was killed.

Hahn said that the

the man, was actually more like a political gelding in 2016 as he stood like a wimp on debate stages and allowed Donald Trump to call his wife “ugly” multiple times while accusing his long deceased father of conspiring to kill President John Kennedy—and Cruz never even raised his voice or his fists in defense of his family honor, so I’m not surprised that he is now defending his abuser, Mr. Trump, because Stockholm Syndrome is real!

But Ted Cruz, the lawyer—a Harvard educated lawyer at that—knows fully well that Trump has been indicted in four separate jurisdictions not because of Joseph Biden, or the Democrats, but because Donald Trump can’t follow simple rules, OR, keep his tiny Twitter fingers at rest, OR, keep his big mouth shut!

Lest we forget that it was Donald Trump who paid illegal hush money to a porn star and a Playboy Playmate—not Joe Biden...

Lest we forget that it was Donald Trump who

force used on Scott was justified. But he does wish there had been more time for negotiation.

In a recent interview, Wood, Hahn’s partner that day, said: “I still have PTSD from a number of incidents. This is one of the main ones.”

Hahn still lives in Baton Rouge. But he said he is not interested in a sit-down or attempt at reconciliation with the Scott family since it would not change what happened. He also doubts that it would bring Shabazz peace.

“I wasn’t happy that Milton Leon Scott was dead,” Hahn said. “I’m sorry for her and her family. I understand they probably don’t like me. That doesn’t bother me; I don’t expect them to. I’d feel the same way if somebody shot my husband or my father.”

This story was written by Myracle Lewis and reported by Lewis, Amelia Gabor, Birdie O’Connell, McKinley Cobb, Brooke Couvillon, Hannah Rehm and MacKenzie Wallace. A companion video by Maria Pham is available at:

This article originally appeared in The Louisiana Weekly.

foolishly removed highly classified documents from the White House, showed them off like county fair prizes to his friends, and refused to give them back to the National Archives—not Joe Biden...

Lest we forget that it was Donald Trump who spoke loudly while exhorting his followers to “March to Capitol Hill and Stop the Steal,” with the alleged “steal” actually being his own “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was “rigged,” this despite having been told by every single Republican with a shred of integrity that the election was lost fairly and squarely to Joe Biden. Subscribe to Hobbservation Point

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By: W.D. Foster-Graham

LOSING LIZZY A Story of Grief

By Lehman Riley

As adults, we know about the life cycles of human existence. In the typical scheme of things, we’re born, we are children, then teenagers, become adults, then seniors, and at some point we die. But what happens when that progression is interrupted, and a child dies before their parents? What about the difference between a natural death from old age and the sudden death of a youth? The grieving process is poignantly described in Lehman Riley’s book Losing Lizzy: A Story of Grief.

Our story begins with our main character Nikki awakened from a sound sleep by a constantly ringing telephone. Sadly, the call is from the police with the news that her sister Lizzy has passed away, and a trip by the family to the police station confirms it. Friends and family, upon hearing the news, come to offer support. Nikki’s friends, the Little Wanderers, can’t

of

believe Lizzy is gone. Her parents are hurting deeply; her mother feels empty, and her father is dealing with survivor guilt. Tears, the remembrance of Lizzy’s last texts and words, and how she wanted to help people are fresh in their minds.

In her words to Nikki, and to the Little Wanderers, Papa Lemon and Mama Sarah remind us that children process and express grief differently from adults, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

Through Dr. Agnew, a therapist recommended by Papa Lemon, Nikki and her family begin to process the trauma of Lizzy’s death, and the story breaks down the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

At Lizzy’s memorial service, Nikki surprises everyone by getting up to speak about her sister. Her words incorporate her feelings for each stage of the grieving process, knowing that it is a process, and finding comfort and faith. Based on the real-life death of his daughter Tianna (Lizzy) at the age of 23, Riley’s story is something that resonates with anyone who has lost a loved one. Losing a child is a parent’s worst nightmare, and I acknowledge him for writing a book on grief that is relatable for children. I had the honor of meeting the author at the Black Children’s Book Fair in St. Paul recently, and I was reminded that though the loss never fully goes away, there is acceptance

and the importance of keeping her memory alive. Out of Riley’s pain and loss came a story that will help and encourage others facing this trauma to seek support, utilize therapy, and pray for God’s grace and comfort. In his words, “Her journey shows readers that even when the tears won’t stop flowing and it feels like happiness will never return, one day they will smile and laugh again.”

Losing Lizzy is a special edition of Riley’s The Adventures of Papa Lemon’s Little Wanderers series, and it is available through Riley’s website, www.papalemonedu. com.

Thank you, Lehman, for sharing your story, its powerful message, the legacy of your grandparents Papa Lemon and Mama Sarah, and the memory of Lizzy.