UPW Urban Pro Weekly

Photo by Vincent Hobbs

UPW URBAN PRO WEEKLY

Trinity CME building ready for relocation

MAY 17 - 31, 2018 VOL. 7 NO. 12

Zora Neale Hurston The New

2018

Photo by Carl Van Vechten

Poor People’s Campaign

Harlem Renaissance Writer’s Book BARRACOON Published after 8 decades

UrbanProWeekly - MAY 17 - 31, 2018

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COMMUNITY

HAPPENINGS

LIBRARIES ROCK! The 2018 Summer Reading Program May 26 – July 27 Explore all things musical this summer with the Augusta-Richmond County Public Library (ARCPLS) as we present the “Libraries Rock” 2018 Summer Reading Program from May 26 to July 27. Patrons are invited to reach their reading goals and win incentives as well as attend one of our many free programs for all ages.

Keep young minds sharp and catch up on those books you have been meaning to take off the shelf by reading for special Summer Reading prizes! Readers of all ages may register any time between May 26 and July 27 and pick up their reading logs at arcpls.org/summer or any of our six library branch locations. Return the completed log to your local ARCPLS branch by July 27 and receive prizes while supplies last and a chance to win a Kindle Fire!

Have fun and keep money in your pocket with free Summer Reading Program activities at all ARCPLS

library branches. Activities range from special story times, a teen talent show, karaoke for kids and adults, movie sing-a-longs, arts and crafts, and more! Contact your local ARCPLS branch or visit arcpls.org/summer for the full SRP schedule of events.

For more information, call 706821-2600 or visit arcpls.org/summer.

Major support for the 2018 Summer Reading Program has been provided by the Wells Fargo Foundation and the Friends of the Augusta Library.

Other sponsors include the Augusta GreenJackets, Lanier’s Fresh Meat Market, Chipotle, Chick-fil-A Augusta Exchange, Krystal, The Book Tavern, Kroger, Krystal, McDonald’s on Peach Orchard Road, Garden City Treats, National Legacy Foundation, Stewart’s Ribs-N-Things, Publix, Bojangles, Ms. Shirley Wills, Augusta Coca-Cola Bottling Company, and the New Moon Café.

Lucy Craft Laney Museum 3rd Annual Golf Tournament Events Tournament Golf Pairing Reception May 19, 2018 May 18, 2018 Registration 6 am - 7 am 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Shotgun Start 8:00 am Augusta Municipal Golf Course Black History The Golf Pairing reception will include live entertainment (featuring Ms. Karen Gordon and Guest Artists), food and drinks. Also featured will be the “ ‘The Journey of African Americans In Golf “ Exhibition by Ramona Harriet.

The tournament on Saturday May 19, 2018 is a Four Person Scramble format. A buffet lunch and awards reception follows. Funds raised from this event will be used to support the Lucy Craft Laney Museum’s community educational programming and facility maintenance.

Early Bird Registration fee, $85.00 per golfer until May 18.

Day of Registration fee is $95.00 per player.

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A steel framework has been placed beneath the historic Trinity CME Church on Eighth Street and the structure has been raised in preparation for the church’s move to a new location. The site where the church currently stands is scheduled for a cleanup to remove soil contaminated by a natural gas plant that closed in the 1950’s. Atlanta Gas Light and the Augusta Canal Authority, with the help of a grant from Partners for Sacred Places, will pay the moving costs. The church is currently slated to be moved across the street, next to the canal.

(May 15, 2018 - Augusta, GA) Photo by Vincent Hobbs

RE-ELECT

Ben

Hasan

Unafraid to make the tough decisions Ben Hasan is proud to support

Ben wants to keep the city on the move . . .

• . . the development of the Sanitary Sewer Program to rid the county of inefficient and environmentally harmful septic tanks.

•He supports increased commercial and retail development for South Augusta and other underserved neighborhoods.

• . . the creation of recreational activities at the Lock and Dam including whitewater rafting, zip lines and river surfing.

•He fought for the Hyde Park relocation which became a reality after decades of inactivity.

• . . . the completion of the SPLOST 7 project list which won 62% of the vote, with a focus on infrastructure, public facilities, recreation, and public safety.

Commission District 6

•During his term, the city has positioned itself as a key stakeholder in the state and federal efforts to make Augusta ground zero in the burgeoning cyber security industry.

•He supports balancing the budget on time, each year, without dipping into the fund balance.

• . . the enhancement public transportation services by adding new buses, initiating construction of a new maintenance facility, and funding new bus shelters.

There’s still work to be done. Vote on May 22 to keep moving forward.

Paid for by the candidate

UrbanProWeekly • MAY 17 - 23, 2018

Trinity CME Church prepared for move

UrbanProWeekly - MAY 17 - 31, 2018

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The literature on the African slave trade, Hurston wrote, had endless “words from the seller, but not one word from the sold.”

Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’ Tells the Story of the Slave Trade’s Last Survivor Published eight decades after it was written, the new book offers a first-hand account of a Middle Passage journey.

By Anna Diamond smithsonian.com Sitting on his porch in 1928, under the Alabama sun, snacking on peaches, Cudjo Lewis (born Oluale Kossola) recounted to his guest his life story: how he came from a place in West Africa, then traversed the Middle Passage in cruel and inhumane conditions on the famed Clotilda ship, and saw the founding of the freedman community of Africatown after five years of enslavement. After two months of listening to Kossola’s tales, his interlocutor asked to take his picture.

Donning his best suit, but slipping off his shoes, Kossola told her, “I want to look lak I in Affica, cause dat where I want to be.”

His listener, companion and scribe was Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated Harlem Renaissance author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. She poured his story, told mostly in his voice and dialect, into Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” After eight decades, the manuscript has finally been published. (The title comes from the Spanish word for an enclosure where slaves were kept before the Middle Passage journey.)

Known mostly as a novelist, Hurston also had a career as an anthropologist. She studied under the well-known Franz Boas, who helped establish Columbia University’s anthropology department, in the 1890s, and she conducted fieldwork on voodoo in Haiti and Jamaica and folktales in the American South.

Under Boas’ guidance, Hurston was part of a school of anthropological thought that was “concerned with debunking scientific racism that many anthropologists had been involved in constructing in late-19th century and in the early years of the 20th century,” explains Deborah Thomas, a professor at University of Pennsylvania and one of the keynote speakers at a 2016 conference on Hurston’s work.

By the time Kossola was brought to the U.S., the slave trade, though not slavery, had been outlawed in the country for some 50 years. In 1860, Alabama slaveholder Timothy Meaher chartered the Clotilda, betting—correctly—that they wouldn’t be caught or tried for breaking the law. The ship’s captain, William Foster, brought 110 West Africans to Mobile, Alabama, where he and Meaher sold some and personally enslaved the rest. To hide evidence of the trafficking, Foster burned the Clotilda, the

remains of which have yet to be found. Still, “press accounts and the kidnappers’ willingness to share their ‘escapade’ meant that the story of the Clotilda was fairly well documented in the late 19th/early 20th century,” explains Hannah Durkin, a scholar of American Studies at Newcastle University.

Almost 90 years old in 1928 when he was interviewed for Barracoon, Kossola was believed to have been the last survivor of the last slave ship.

As she explained in her introduction, he is “the only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.”

Unlike other well-known slave narratives, which often include escape or bids for self-purchase, or speak to the abolition struggle, Barracoon stands alone. “His narrative does not recount a journey forward into the American Dream,” writes Plant. “It is a kind of slave narrative in reverse, journeying backwards to barracoons, betrayal, and barbarity. And then even further back, to a period of tranquility, a time of freedom, and a sense of belonging.”

Hurston’s approach to telling Kossola’s story was to totally immerse herself in his life, whether that meant helping him clean the church where he was a sexton, driving him down to the bay so he could get crabs, or bringing him summertime fruit. She built up trust with her subject starting with the basics: his name. When Hurston arrives at his home, Kossola tears up after she uses his given name: “Oh Lor’, I know it you call my name. Nobody don’t callee me my name from cross de water but you. You always callee me Kossula, jus’ lak I in de Affica soil!”

(Hurston chose to use of Kossola’s vernacular throughout the book, “a vital and authenticating feature of the narrative,” writes Plant.)

With Kossola guiding the way through his story, Hurston transcribed tales of his childhood in Dahomey (now Benin), his capture at 19, his time in a barracoon, his dehumanizing arrival, and five years of enslavement in Alabama.

After emancipation, Kossola and his fellow Clotilda survivors established the community of Africatown when their return home was denied to them. Hurston chronicles his attempt to maintain a family whose members were taken from him one by one, through natural causes or vio-

Zora Neale Hurston (Barbara Hurston Lewis, Faye Hurston & Lois Gaston)

lence. He tells her through tears, “Cudjo feel so lonely, he can’t help he cry sometime.”

Hurston’s perspective comes in and out of the narrative only occasionally. She uses it to set the scene for her readers and to give fuller context to the experience, as when, after her subject recounts a certain memory, he is transported. She writes, “Kossula was no longer on the porch with me. He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey.

His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He had forgotten that I was there. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke.”

Completed in 1931, Hurston’s manuscript was never published. Viking Press expressed some interest in her proposal but demanded she change Kossola’s dialect to language, which she refused to do. Between the Great Depression’s quashing effect on the market, this early rejection, tensions with her patron, and Hurston’s interest in other projects, Barracoon was never exposed to a broad audience. In an echo of her work with Kossola, Hurston’s own life story was buried for a time, and the writer risked slipping into obscurity. In the late 1970s, writer Alice Walker spearheaded a rereading of Hurston’s work, which brought her books much deserved attention. Still dedicated to upholding and recognizing Hurston’s legacy, Walker wrote the foreword to the new book.

Poor People’s Campaign A National Call For Moral Revival

By Stuart Miller

By Patrik Jonsson

SAVANNAH For all its aspirations toward justice for all, the encampment known as Resurrection City became more a symbol of lost hope than empowerment.

The base camp was the emblem of the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, the sprawling camp on the National Mall lost its chief architect, The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4. After a police crackdown on the remaining campers in June of that year, the camp and its populist struggle against economic inequality faded into the whir of Woodstock and war.

Bernard Lafayette, of Tampa, Fla., was a national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign. He mourned his friend, Dr. King. And he watched the movement falter, and fade. But he e didn’t give up the dream.

Mr. Lafayette, now 77, has returned to train a new generation.

In yet another era of upheaval and h dissonance, Lafayette and the Poor People’s Campaign are back to remind Americans that, as one 1968 brochure read, “Poor people are kept in poverty because they are kept from power.”

Starting this week, thousands of Americans have begun a 40-day camo paign of protest and civil disobedience.

Lafayette says, despite new challenges and what he calls a positioning of poverty as a personal moral failing, rather than a social ill, the project ulti, mately has the same objective as the d original campaign.

“Politicians usually just looked at g statistics about poverty, and we wanted h them to see people,” says Lafayette.

The challenge is substantial: America, d after all, has since its founding shown a tendency to downplay the depth of US

poverty as more the price of personal shiftlessness than the result of national prerogatives. No matter the campaign’s impact, poverty experts say, its existence is already a powerful signal of how the moral ground has shifted.

“People concerned with poverty programs, with economic justice, are today being accused of aiding and abetting poor people – that this sort of governmental concern with poverty is somehow immoral itself,” says University of North Carolina law professor Gene Nichol, whose UNC Poverty Center was shut down in 2015 by a state legislature unwilling to spend money to study the effects of policy on the poor. “The moral high ground is now tough love for poor people.”

Changing that narrative is both a moral and economic imperative, says one of the chief organizers, the Rev. William Barber II of North Carolina, founder of North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement. “Morality is not merely inspirational, it is pragmatic.”

Today’s movement is patterned in part on the experience of the Moral Monday protest movement in North Carolina, where hundreds of people have been arrested in protest of what they see as Robin-Hood-in-reverse policymaking by mainly Republican lawmakers. The group has not announced what acts of civil disobedience are in the works, but says arrests are expected.

“If it’s necessary, I’ll go out there and I will go to jail again,” says Lafayette.

Even as America has grown wealthier since 1968, inequalities remain stark.

Median white household wealth is $171,000 today, 10 times the median for black households.

That intransigence underscores a hard-to-swallow irony: The wealthiest Western nation has the highest poverty rate. In turn, that creates a domino

Mississippians made themselves at home during May 1968 in ‘Resurrection City,’ an expanse of tents set up during an extended occupation of the National Mall in Washington. In foreground is Michael Lee, age 3. In background, from left: Francis Nunn of Crenshaw, Miss.; Jerry Davis, 7; and Edith Maydukes of Marks, Miss. Charles Tasnadi/AP/File effect of tragedies, including alarmingly high infant mortality rates, especially among the poor – and especially among African-Americans.

The wealth gap has remained virtually unchanged since 1968, and may get worse, some economists worry, given the recent tax cuts aimed at businesses and the wealthy. The national push to reverse illegal immigration and reignite a drug war that disproportionately impacts poor people also may exacerbate poverty rates. Organizers say that national leaders have found success in sowing the discord of a zero sum game, which Mr. Barber and others say leaves many poorer Americans so busy fighting for scraps that they forget to look up.

The campaign’s new study, The Souls of Poor Folk, highlights a wide range of problems: More than 40 percent of Americans are either poor or low-income. There were 187,914 state and federal inmates in 1968 but 1.45 million in 2016, and people of color account for 66 percent of inmates but only 39 percent of the total population. The number of citizens who have lost their right to vote as a result of felony convictions has tripled, from 2 million in 1968 to

6.1 million in 2016.

Such facts underscore why “it is more important to reach out today than it was in 1968,” says Carlos Santacruz, a Detroit-based activist who is coordinating for seven states in the new campaign. Mr. Santacruz added that he felt it was important to reach poor whites and connect them to the same cause as blacks and Latinos. “We’ve become a highly segregated, highly racialized country where the common narrative is that if you’re suffering then someone else is benefiting.”

How much that remains true will determine the arc of a campaign that is expected to last 40 days and is intended as a first step. The campaign hopes to draw 25,000 to 30,000 participants, with each week featuring a different theme, from institutionalized racism to ecological devastation. There will then be a mobilization in Washington, D.C., on June 23rd. After gathering input from the national network, the group will release a set of policy goals in June.

“We are not calling that the culmination,” says the Rev. Liz Theoharis, one of the chief organizers. “We see this not as a moment but as a movement.”

5 UrbanProWeekly • MAY 3 - 9, 2018

The campaign hopes to draw 25,000 to 30,000 participants, with each week featuring a different theme, from institutionalized racism to ecological devastation.

There will then be a mobilization in Washington, D.C. on June 23rd.

UrbanProWeekly - MAY 17 - 31, 2018

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Georgia’s statewide Primary Election Do you know the candidates for state office?

Georgia holds a statewide primary election Tuesday. Here are the biggest races to watch come Election Day.

Democratic Candidate for Governor Stacey Evans GOVERNOR’S RACE It’s a crowded race to succeed Gov. Nathan Deal, who cannot run for a third term. There are five leading Republicans and two Democrats in the May 22 primary, and all of them have different messages and policy platforms to try to compete for a sliver of the vote.

The Democratic ticket pits two young attorneys who endured tough childhoods and served in the Legislature together before both decided to aim for the state’s top job.

Former House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams has earned heaps of national attention for her bid to become the nation’s first black female governor and her outspoken progressive positions on issues such as gun control and higher education.

Ex-state Rep. Stacey Evans has staked out left-leaning positions, too, but she has focused her campaign largely on reversing cuts to the HOPE LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR Five hopefuls are running to replace Cagle as lieutenant governor.

Three Republicans and two Democrats will be on primary election ballots, each hoping to secure enough votes to represent his or her political party in November.

Former state Rep. Geoff Duncan

Democratic Candidate for Governor Stacey Abrams

scholarship that Abrams brokered with Republican leaders in 2011.

Their biggest divide may be their competing strategies to retake the governor’s office for Democrats for the first time since 2002. Evans is banking on a more conventional Democratic strategy of winning over independent voters and moderates, particularly suburban women, who have fled to the GOP. Abrams has staked her campaign on energizing 800,000 left-leaning voters, many of whom are minorities, who rarely cast ballots. She says Evans’ approach clings to the same strategy that led the party to defeats in the past four statewide races.

On the Republican side, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle may have the biggest name recognition, thanks to three statewide election victories. He’s trying to win over conservatives with promises to sign a “religious liberty” bill and expand gun rights.

of Cumming, former state Sen. Rick Jeffares of Locust Grove and state Sen. David Shafer of Duluth are vying for the Republican nomination.

Duncan is running as an outsider after serving five years in the state House of Representatives. Jeffares served seven years in the Senate, and Shafer served 16, including five

Secretary of State Brian Kemp has adopted a “Georgia First” mantra and is aiming for the same rural vote that powered Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the Peach State. Kemp pledges new crackdowns on illegal immigration and new anti-gang initiatives.

Former state Sen. Hunter Hill is trying to carve out a lane as a conservative outsider. He’s vowed to eliminate the state income tax and promised not to “give an inch” on the Second Amendment.

Two other GOP candidates are trying to gain late traction. Executive Clay Tippins is emphasizing his business background — and lack of political experience — while pushing to crack down on sex trafficking and boost elementary school reading.

And state Sen. Michael Williams is trying to outflank his opponents with calls for tougher restrictions on abortion and ending tax breaks for special interests.

as president pro tempore of the chamber.

While the Republican race is made up of men who are either current or former legislators, both Democrats are women making their first foray into public office.

Business executive Sarah Riggs Amico and small business owner Triana Arnold James are seeking the

Democratic nomination in Tuesday’s election.

All five candidates said in addition to presiding over the Senate, the lieutenant governor’s office would put them in a position to take a leadership role in shaping the state’s policy discussions.

Continued on the next page

7 UrbanProWeekly • MAY 17 - 23, 2018

aide and the president of the Georgia This is Keatley’s second attempt at Christian Coalition, is also running running for public office. The Ohio as a Republican, as is Tracy Jordan, native and former French professor a pharmacist, Realtor and former ran in last year’s special election in Hoschton city councilwoman. the 6th Congressional District. He In the Democratic primary, insur- finished 16th among 18 candidates, ance agent Janice Laws faces off garnering only 229 votes. against health care advocate Cindy Quinn, a Tignall native who now Zeldin. lives in Atlanta, said his interest in the With auto insurance premiums ris- Labor Department began as a student ing faster in Georgia than in almost at Paine College when he interned at any other state, all the candidates one of the agency’s career centers. are calling for changes in state law to Both candidates said they believe make it easier for the commissioner the state needs to invest in the career to stop or slow rate hikes. Zeldin centers that are spread across the has also proposed holding public state, increase the minimum wage hearings on insurance rate increases, and expand educational opportuniwhile Beck has said the commissioner ties. should consider fighting insurance Butler is running unopposed in the companies in court if necessary.

Republican primary.

In addition, the candidates said Democratic Candidates for Lieutenant Governor Sarah Riggs Amico (L) they would work with the governor’s and Triana Arnold James (R) office to get waivers to help more Georgians obtain health insurance, or SECRETARY OF STATE an unsuccessful 2014 bid to replace they would support Medicaid expanThe race for secretary of state takes Deal as governor. A central plank of sion under the Affordable Care Act. on greater significance this year Barge’s gubernatorial campaign was because Georgia is considering more money for schools, something LABOR COMMISSIONER replacing its electronic voting Woods also has pushed for.

Two Democrats will face off this machines with a system with Voters concerned about school month for the chance to challenge a paper backup. The secretary of funding will have a hard time using longtime Republican state Labor state will likely be responsible for the issue to differentiate between the Commissioner Mark Butler. overseeing the state’s purchase and candidates: All three Democrats say Former Georgia State professor implementation of such a system. they want lawmakers and the gov- Richard Keatley and Fred Quinn, A pack of experienced candidates ernor to put more money into edu- who recently worked for the Federal entered the race to succeed Kemp, cation, too. Sid Chapman, a former Reserve Bank of Atlanta, both say who is running for governor after high school teacher who serves as they are better suited for the job than serving eight years as secretary of president of the Georgia Association Butler. state. of Educators, is competing with two The Department of Labor provides The four Republican candidates are Army veterans — Otha Thornton, a services to job seekers and employformer Alpharetta Mayor David Belle former president of the National PTA, ers, including running Georgia’s Isle, state Rep. Buzz Brockway, state and Sam Mosteller, a former head of unemployment insurance program R.J. Hadley Democratic Candidate Sen. Josh McKoon and state Rep. Brad the Georgia chapter of the Southern and overseeing child labor issues. for Secretary of State.

Raffensperger.

Christian Leadership Conference.

On the Democratic side, former Another big issue — school safety U.S. Rep. John Barrow faces former — reveals a greater divide: All three state Rep. Dee Dawkins-Haigler and Democrats oppose arming teachers, RJ Hadley, the chief deputy tax com- which is allowed under state law. missioner for Rockdale County.

The two Republicans would leave All the candidates want to replace that decision to the school districts, Georgia’s 16-year-old touchscreen though Barge prefers trained pervoting machines with a voting system sonnel and says he’d recruit retired that includes a paper record for veterans and police officers to patrol recounts and audits. schools.

But they disagree on what voting technology the state should buy.

INSURANCE COMMISSIONER Options include pen-and-paper Three Republicans and two ballots and touchscreens with paper. Democrats are battling it out to decide the party’s nominees to STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF become Georgia’s next insurance regSCHOOLS ulator and fire marshal.

Five men are vying for Georgia’s Georgia Insurance Commissioner top education job, and two of them Ralph Hudgens, who has served in — both of the Republicans — already the office since 2011, is retiring. have experience as state schools Running to replace him is Jay superintendent.

Florence, a former deputy comIncumbent Richard Woods is missioner who is Hudgens’ choice. Democratic candidates for secretary of state John Barrow and Dee defending the seat against John Florence is running as a Republican. Dawkins-Haigler participate in a debate during a May 3 taping of the Barge, who left after one term in Jim Beck, another former Hudgens Atlanta Press Club at the Georgia Public Broadcasting studio in Atlanta.

UrbanProWeekly - MAY 17 - 31, 2018

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FORUM

The poor blamed for low performing schools

Poor families are to blame for their poorly educated children, so says a Georgia Budget & Policy Institute (GBPI) website article, Tackle Poverty’s Effects to Improve School Performance. Citing a summer 2017 GBPI school district survey, “Seventy percent of Georgia’s school district leaders say poverty is the most significant out-of-school issue that limits student learning. Poverty imposes significant barriers to learning on children. Low-income children often are not ready to learn when they enter the classroom, from Kindergarten to twelfth grade.” The article is must reading for white and black conservatives who love to blame poor blacks for their lack of academic achievement.

District leaders from 124 of Georgia’s 180 districts responded to the survey in such a way as to throw poor black students under the bus.

Their responses suggest poor students are responsible for low performing schools, not inexperienced, uninspiring principals and teachers. Even the article stated, “Teachers are the most influential factor in student learning.

CSRA Business League’s Quarterly Legislative Update Session set for May 29 The CSR A Business League, Inc. Quarterly Legislative Update session with members of the Augusta Delegation to the Georgia General Assembly, will take place on 29 May 2018 at the main branch of the Augusta - Richmond County Public Library.

The session is free and Refreshments will be served.

To register, call 706 722 - 0994 or email<mailto:shauncassandrawalton@business-league.org> for additional information.

The library is located at 823 Telfair Street in downtown Augusta.

UPW Urban Pro Weekly Hephzibah, GA 30815

Principals are second only to teachers in fostering high levels of learning.” The problem is inexperienced principals and teachers are assigned to neglected schools with majority disadvantaged students. Furthermore, they lack the skillset to effectively administer and teach. As a result, over 25 percent become frustrated and leave. This has an adverse effect on the school climate and public perception.

Moreover, the article mentioned schools earn low scores where low-income black students comprise the majority of students. The article explains, “Too often these schools are in communities whose members have long faced barriers to well-paying jobs, postsecondary institutions, healthcare, safe and affordable housing, and other resources that build the pathway to economic opportunity.” The barriers

are racist policies which ensure the majority of blacks remain low-income and poorly educated.

Therefore, to say disadvantaged black children are responsible for low performing schools is just as ignorant as Kanye West suggesting slavery was a choice.

Kevin Palmer Evans, GA

COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION OF RICHMOND COUNTY The Richmond County School System will accept bids and request for proposals until 3:00 p.m., Wednesday, June 13, 2018, for the following: 1. Elevator Service and Maintenance RFP#2018-006 2. Enterprise Resource Planning Software and Services RFP#18-820 3. Printing Services RFP#18-812 4. Request for Qualifications: “Energy Conservation Services” RFQ#18-811 5. Replacement School Bus Tires RFP#18-817 6. Replacement Tires for Cars, Light Trucks and Vans RFP#18-818 7. School Bus Engines: Replacement and Installation RFP#18-816 8. School Bus Seat Repair Supplies RFQ#18-815 9. Speech & Language Pathology and American Sign Language Interpreter Services RFP #18-813 10. Telecommunications Billing Audit Services RFP#18-814 11. Towing Service RFP#18-819 Bid specifications may be obtained by contacting Cecilia Perkins in the Business Office at perkice@boe.richmond.k12.ga.us or 706-826-1298, on our web site at www.rcboe.org/bids, or at Richmond County School System, Central Office 864 Broad Street, 4th Floor, Augusta, GA 30901.

The Richmond County School System reserves the right to reject any and all bids and to waive technicalities and informalities.

COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION OF RICHMOND COUNTY By: Dr. Angela D. Pringle, Secretary

URBAN PRO WEEKLY Publisher URBAN PRO WEEKLY MEDIA 706-306-4647 urbanpromedia@yahoo.com

CEO / Sales FREDERICK BENJAMIN SR. 706-306-4647 editor@urbanproweekly.com

Contributors VINCENT HOBBS Photography & New Media