Harlem Troupe Prepares for Act II

By GIA KOURLAS

HOW long can a company remain on hiatus until it disappears for good? In 2004 Dance Theater of Harlem, facing debt of about $2.3 million, was forced to shutter its 44-member professional company. Months turned into years, and it seemed as if the vibrant group, formed in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would end up a footnote to dance history.

But with a new artistic director, Virginia Johnson — whose career at Dance Theater, where she was a founding member, lasted 28 years — the organization has a five-year plan that includes bringing the company back to life in 2013.

“Arthur Mitchell used to say, ‘It took us 15 years to become Dance Theater of Harlem,’ ” Ms. Johnson said at the organization’s Harlem headquarters, where there is still a school and studio space. “It takes time to get everybody to dance the same and to build a repertoire that says, ‘This is who we are.’ ” She shook her head. “We can’t wait another 15 years. It’s already been six.”

Ms. Johnson, 60, is well acquainted with the financial precariousness of the dance world. After retiring from the stage, she spent nine years as the editor of Pointe Magazine, at which she gained a breadth of knowledge about the economic, as well as the artistic, side of ballet. At Dance Theater she works in equal partnership with Laveen Naidu, its executive director, also a former company member. Together they are creating a new Dance Theater of Harlem that looks beyond its roots as the first major black ballet troupe to ask what ballet means in the 21st century.

“Ballet is a way of elevating the spirit,” Ms. Johnson said. “It’s about being the most that a human being can be. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t subscribe to the specifics of pointed feet and point shoes. I believe in point shoes wholeheartedly. I want to see more of them, and that’s going to continue to be a key part of what Dance Theater of Harlem does, but I also think: Frogs and fairies, no. We’re not going to do so much of that.”

The new Dance Theater will be substantially smaller — with 18 dancers to begin with — but will afford Ms. Johnson and Mr. Naidu a chance to reinvent. “We have a huge opportunity to do something that is of this moment,” Ms. Johnson said.

The trick is to make it sustainable. When the company comes back, Mr. Naidu, 42, said: “We want to level out at around a $5.5 million organization.”

Mr. Naidu has spent the last several years focused on reducing debt. (It is now, he said, under $1 million.) After Ms. Johnson became the artistic director in January, financing followed from, among others, the Mellon and Ford Foundations. While Dance Theater remains lean — there are 17 employees — money from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone made it possible for Mr. Naidu to hire a marketing associate and a major gifts officer. And the Empowerment Zone has provided a development consultant, Emma E. Dunch, who has “ballet in her soul,” Ms. Johnson said of Ms. Dunch, laughing. “She doesn’t let anything slide, but that’s exactly what we need.”

The five-year plan includes increasing the board to 30 members from 14. It also focuses on two crucial issues that Ms. Johnson sees as universal problems in ballet: audience and repertory. With a Rockefeller Foundation 2010 NYC Cultural Innovation grant, she has instituted Harlem Dance Works 2.0, a dance laboratory that is essentially about creating choreography for a company that doesn’t exist.

In “For Two,” the first installment, Ms. Johnson commissioned duets by Robert Garland, Helen Pickett and Darrell Grand Moultrie and hired professional dancers to perform them. This month Dance Theater hosted weekly showings of works in progress at its headquarters, followed by discussions with the choreographers and audience members. The final program is Thursday night, and in a new push by Dance Theater to embrace the Internet, Web casts will also be available.

In spring Dance Works will undertake two more projects. One will focus on setting the pas de deux from Alvin Ailey’s 1972 work “The Lark Ascending,” which Dance Theater was awarded an American Masterpieces grant to reconstruct. The second provides studio time for Thaddeus Davis, who will begin to choreograph a work for the company’s opening in 2013.

“Thaddeus understands that ballet is something that is broader, deeper, stronger than the currently understood notion of it,” Ms. Johnson said. “It’s a good time to be an African-American-based company talking about our role in this country beyond, O.K., jazz. There’s so much more material to explore. And that’s what I want Dance Theater of Harlem to do. To bring that to our stage — that we aren’t one subject, one story, but so many stories.”

Ms. Johnson said she also believes in resource sharing — or, as she put it, “how to make companies work in the modern world” — and has initiated a partnership with Karole Armitage. For the next several months Ms. Armitage will be in residence at Dance Theater, where she receives subsidized studio time. Her next ballet will include members of the Dance Theater of Harlem Ensemble, made up of students in the professional training and fellows programs at the Dance Theater’s school.

“She’s curious,” Ms. Johnson said. “I think that being curious is something that we don’t have a lot of in the ballet world.”

To foster more creative thinking, Ms. Johnson has instituted the Whole Dancer Curriculum, which at the moment is geared toward students enrolled in the professional training program. Along with nutrition, music and drama, the plan is to also instruct dancers on how to make the transition from student to professional. In other words, Ms. Johnson asked, “How do you prepare for not being told how to do every single thing?”

After a recent rehearsal with the ensemble, currently 15 dancers under the direction of Keith Saunders, these issues were on Ms. Johnson’s mind. She sees the ensemble, which is currently the performing entity of the organization, as the nucleus of her future company’s corps de ballet. (Once Dance Theater is re-formed, the ensemble will be disbanded.)

“You’re worried about getting all the steps right,” she told one dancer. “But your worry makes it so small that it’s not interesting to watch.” She also bluntly noted the group’s lack of musicality, saying, “You’re not going to prison,” and “I feel like you’re dancing the steps and the music is in another room.”

It was unexpected, yet entertaining. Ms. Johnson, ravishing as ever, possesses an aura of tranquillity that makes her criticism especially jarring. She doesn’t mess around, especially when it comes to what she wants to instill in her dancers: that they must learn how to think.

“The thing about being a 21st-century dancer is that we’re not just training bodies,” she said. “You have to be able to bring something to your work. There are so many more things about being an artist than, ‘Is your tendu crossed over?’ We’ve done a disservice to our dancers over these years: made them empty headed.”

And she wants Dance Theater to be the same beacon of possibility that it was in its early days. Her mission is to maintain a company that, while diverse, is more than half African-American. “The reason for Dance Theater of Harlem and the fire behind it has got to still be there,” she said. “Now it’s going to be hard to do. I’m not Arthur Mitchell, and I have a very different way of making things happen. But I believe it can happen because it’s in the work.” She smiled.

“We have to maintain our tradition and walk into the future,” she said. “That’s what it is.”

Courtesy of the New York Times

The New Harlem Renaissance

Just about every economic change that's reshaping today's New York can be found on the two-mile stretch of Harlem cityscape known as 116th Street.

   By Daniel Massey

Buck Ennis [+] Enlarge

Strip of dreams Public reinvestment in blighted neighborhoods by the Koch administration in the 1980s brought population growth and business development back to 116th Street.

Also See

• Gallery: 116th Street: A slice of NY life

On a recent Saturday night, a red carpet was rolled out on Frederick Douglass Boulevard near West 116th Street. Bright lights shone, West African music pulsed through the air and lanky models showed off a new collection of Africa-inspired clothing by Ibrahima Doukoure to mark his boutique's third anniversary.

The scene was a far cry from the one on 116th Street when Guinean-born Mr. Doukoure arrived in Harlem from Rome 16 years ago. Then, he had to walk to 110th Street and Broadway just to find a bank. He had to lie to Yellow Cab drivers to get a ride home, telling them he was going to 110th and Central Park West.

Click here for more 

 

Published: October 31, 2010 3:00 a.m.

Racial jobs gap widens in county

Leaders trying to better blacks’ work prospects

Angela Mapes Turner

The Journal Gazette

The Journal Gazette

A helping hand

The Fort Wayne Urban League has a goal for dealing with high unemployment – offer hope, CEO Jonathan Ray said.

“When people find doors that are closed, and no options, that’s when they give up,” he said.

Ray wasn’t surprised to hear the black unemployment rate has increased; he’s seen a ramping up of demand over the past couple of years for the Urban League’s programs for unemployed.

The Urban League, 2135 S. Hanna St., has been cultivating its contacts with local businesses.

If unemployed people can’t be matched to a potential job, Urban League staff and volunteers try to identify skills and deficiencies – whether adults are trying to get back into the workplace or get a first job.

There’s a jobs board, where unemployed can check daily postings. The Urban League offers a résumé-writing service, and everyone who enters leaves with an e-mail address if they don’t already have one because so many jobs today require online applications, Ray said.

Learn more: For information about Urban League programs, go to www.fwurbanleague.org or call 745-3100

FORT WAYNE – Most of the people sitting around long tables at the Fort Wayne Urban League on a recent weekday afternoon were too young to work.

But the organizer of the forum on race and poverty said she was motivated to plan the program in part because she’s concerned about future job prospects – and how they affect quality of life – for kids at risk of dropping out of school.

“Race, poverty, education, the criminal justice system – it’s all one,” said Sheila Curry Campbell, who leads a local chapter of the national group Students Against Violence Everywhere.

The topic was timely: Allen County’s black community is bearing the brunt of the recession, with about one in four adults jobless last year as the racial unemployment disparity grew, U.S. census figures released last month suggest.

Black unemployment grew dramatically in Allen County in just a year – from an estimated 15.5 percent unemployment among blacks in 2008 to 28.2 percent last year, according to statistics by the census’s American Community Survey.

In comparison, unemployment among whites grew from an estimated 5.1 percent in 2008 to 9.5 percent in 2009. The gap between employment of the two races widened from an estimated 10.4 percentage points in 2008 to 18.7 percentage points in 2009.

Reliable data on local unemployment by race are difficult to find. The American Community Survey data on black unemployment – because they cover a small segment of the population – have a margin of error of about 5 percentage points most years.

Even the best-case scenario in Allen County, based on the margin of error, has a 12-point spread, with black unemployment at 22.9 percent versus 10.8 percent for whites.

The worst-case scenario based on that margin of error has black unemployment in Allen County last year at 33.5 percent, putting the county on par with Detroit’s Wayne County, where an estimate of nearly one in three blacks was unemployed.

The numbers come as no surprise to many in Allen County, including Campbell, whose after-school program at the Urban League gathered a group of kids of various races and all ages for a roundtable discussion.

Despite the downturn in local manufacturing, Campbell still believes training in the skilled trades is an important part of the area’s educational landscape. She’s been working with a local executive to write letters to union halls, asking for skilled-trades workers to mentor students as a way to keep kids in school while teaching them job skills.

She maintains hope that middle-class jobs will return, and she hopes the words of her father – who was always tinkering with cars and taught Campbell’s brother the trade – will yet prove true.

“My dad always told me, ‘If you can build it with your hands, you’ll always have a job,’ ” she said.

National trend

Racial disparity in unemployment isn’t new. Nationally, the black unemployment rate tends to be about twice the white rate.

In September, the national unemployment rate was 8.7 percent for whites and 16.1 percent for blacks, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The American Community Survey’s data aren’t directly comparable to those compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics because of differences in data collection.

Other parts of the nation show the trend as well. In Washington, D.C., the employment gap is the widest it has ever been, according to a study this month by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, which conducts research on budget and tax issues in the District of Columbia.

 

And a report this year by the Economic Policy Institute found that in Minneapolis and Memphis, black unemployment rates were three times the white rates. The non-profit Washington, D.C., think tank focuses on the economic conditions of low- and middle-income Americans.

The Economic Policy Institute’s analysis looked at the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, which do not include Fort Wayne.

The report measured joblessness by looking at the percentages of people over the age of 16 who did not have jobs and were actively looking for work. But the number also includes “discouraged workers” who have given up looking for employment and those incarcerated or on probation or parole.

The Economic Policy Institute also analyzed Current Population Survey data on Indiana’s unemployment rate for The Journal Gazette. The data showed Indiana’s black unemployment rate rose to 18.7 percent last year, the highest it had been since the mid-1980s, compared with 8.8 percent last year for whites.

The estimates can’t be directly compared with the American Community Survey, which comes from other sources and has less stringent criteria for its definition of unemployment. The American Community Survey showed Indiana’s unemployment rate for blacks at 20.8 percent last year and 9.9 percent for whites.

Comparable or not, all the data sources showed a disproportionate impact of the recession on blacks in the workforce.

The situation has Princess Sharp, 21, rethinking her goals. The IPFW student clutched a stack of books and pulled her bright blue jacket closer as she walked across campus to a Friday afternoon class.

She lost her job working with developmentally disabled people about two years ago but considers herself fortunate because she was able to find a similar job since then. Still, she’s working toward a degree in psychology and, in the meantime, is also training to be a dental technician – all in hopes she’ll find not merely a job but one that will last.

“Job security is very important to me,” she said.

Promoting diversity

As the Urban League works with job-seekers to find positions and promote education, it also wants to work with employers, CEO Jonathan Ray said.

While the Urban League’s goal is to make sure potential employees are prepared, Ray also wants local employers to work to make their job-selection processes inclusive.

“We need to promote more diversity in the workplace,” he said.

The Economic Policy Institute’s recent analysis of metropolitan areas found racial disparities in unemployment even at the same education level.

But that doesn’t mean education is any less important. The Rev. Bill McGill, president of the Fort Wayne-Allen County NAACP, has called it “issue one, issue two and issue three” on the local branch’s list of priorities.

The branch recently gave the largest scholarship to a college student in its history, a $2,000 grant to a student studying pre-medicine. It’s part of a goal to teach black youth that the academic process doesn’t stop at high school.

“A college degree is no longer an option,” McGill said. “It’s a necessity.”

McGill believes fostering a spirit of entrepreneurship also will be an important element in reducing the racial disparity. He invokes the spirit of Madam C.J. Walker, the Indianapolis businesswoman said to be the first woman to become a millionaire by her own achievements.

“It’s not who you work for but who works for you,” he said. “That’s the reality of the new economy.”

Some professionals at McGill’s church, Imani Baptist Temple, are planning a program to help people look at their résumés – specifically to address wording on résumés to help potential employees better sell and market themselves.

The idea, similar to the Urban League’s, is nothing new, McGill said, but the more programs like it, the better.

“Somebody in Allen County is starting to hire,” he said. “So we’ve got to make sure all individuals are put in the mix.”

aturner@jg.net

© Copyright 2010 The Journal Gazette. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

No boys allowed

Lesbian-only building irks local activist - NYPOST.com

No boys allowed

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Last Updated: 2:40 AM, October 31, 2010

Posted: 1:49 AM, October 31, 2010

Sorry, fellas!

An East Village co-op that's home to one of the city's top housing officials has become a women-only building where dirt-cheap units are marketed only by word of mouth to the residents' pals, The Post has learned.

"I find it strange that no man has ever moved in," said Roberto Caballero, a former district leader in the neighborhood. "I would consider that a form of discrimination."

Caballero, who is openly gay, says he believes "lesbians are favored for apartments" -- as more than half of the building's 12 known female residents are gay.

The seven-unit building on East 11th Street near Avenue B was once owned by the city but was given away for peanuts in 1989 at a time when the neighborhood was overrun by junkies and drug dealers.

Intended as low-income housing, the five-story tenement has become a destination for well-to-do lesbians, including Margarita Lopez, the $187,000-per-year Housing Authority board member and one-time city councilwoman, and Rosie Mendez, a current councilwoman.

Despite the area's gentrification, units sell for an astoundingly low $250 apiece plus capital improvement fees, with the caveat that the owner cannot sell for a profit, according to a contract with the city.

The contract requires that new tenants be found "through a communitywide outreach program that will be nondiscriminatory." But Lopez admitted, "The apartments are not marketed. It's through word of mouth to the people we know in the community."

No man is known to have applied or been turned away. Gender discrimination in housing is against the law, which Lopez has a hand in enforcing in her day job as commissioner of the city's 178,407 public-housing units.

Lopez declined to answer questions about the alleged discrimination, instead combatively asking back: "Are you implying that we have a problem with men?"

She insisted the demographics of her own building have "nothing to do with me being the No. 3 official in NYCHA." She added, "I lived in this building long before I ever dreamed of being an official."

Lopez has also long tapped the residents of the five-story tenement building for government jobs. When she was on the City Council, she hired Mendez, who bought a unit in 1995, to her council staff. Later, Lopez groomed Mendez to be her successor on the council.

When Lopez was named to the Housing Authority's three-person board in 2006, she hired her upstairs neighbor as her executive assistant, paying her $121,000 a year.

In the 1980s, Lopez and five other women put in hard labor renovating the gutted building, in return for $630,000 in building funds -- nearly all of it in the form of charity and taxpayer grants and loans.

Residents had to qualify as low-income, at least initially. But once you're in, you're in forever -- even if you start making big bucks, like Mendez's $112,500 council salary.

Mendez said that when there was a vacancy the residents didn't discuss gender.

"It wasn't couched in terms of men and women," she said. "It was couched in terms of vacancies and 'Let's start interviewing people.' "

She said she didn't know if a man had ever applied but added, "I've never heard of any."

Subway Preachers Speak of God - Riders Rush By

Speaking of God, as Souls Hurry By
By JAMES ESTRIN

The graffiti has been replaced by advertising. The tokens have been replaced by MetroCards. But the subway preachers are a constant. They were there before I was born and will likely be there after I die — unless, of course, their occasional prophecy of the exact date that the world will end turns out to be accurate.

Some hand out leaflets quietly while others shout passages from the Bible. Some have a strict schedule; others show up whenever they are moved to do so. There seems to be little uncertainty of mission, no sign of existential angst. Most are Christian, servants of Jesus, but there is the occasional Hasidic Jew wandering the concourses. These proselytizers do not, generally, ask for much. You don’t have to give them money to buy a sandwich, and you’re not really obliged to feel guilty if you look away. If you take a tract or ask a question, you’ve gone well beyond your civic duty. Most riders ignore them. Over the past few months, I did not.



JOHN OKORN, 71

OBSERVED Quietly handing out tracts one Saturday at 6 p.m. in the Atlantic Avenue station in Downtown Brooklyn.

BACKGROUND A retired optical engineer from Long Island, he has been preaching in the subway at least once a week since 1994, partly in response to his deep disappointment after believing a radio minister who predicted that the world would end that year.

MESSAGE Christians should not participate in Halloween.

“Halloween is a pagan holiday. You cannot worship God and then worship idols and witches and demons. I used to do it myself. People do these things because they don't know the truth. I use other tracts at other times of the year. When was the Messiah born? Not on Christmas. There's no such thing as Christmas. There's no such thing as Good Friday or Palm Sunday either.”

•

MICHAEL AITCHISON, 55

OBSERVED A Sunday at 3:30 p.m., handing out religious tracts in the Times Square station and having calm conversations with those who stop.

BACKGROUND He is a psychiatric social worker who runs a psychiatric unit in an upstate prison.

MESSAGE The world will end May 21, 2011.

“The day of rapture is the end of God's mercy. It is the day when those who are believers will be caught up in Christ in the air. That is also the beginning of Judgment Day, which is a five-month period that will start with a huge earthquake. On Oct. 21, 2011, the heavens and the earth will burned up in fire.”

•

SERGIO TORRES, 26

OBSERVED A Sunday at 3:30 p.m., reading from the Bible very loudly in the Times Square station.

BACKGROUND He said he was “not with a church” and preached when he was moved to do so.

MESSAGE The word of God is the absolute truth.

“People don't want to believe in an omnipotent God creating all of this. They just want to believe in science, evolution or whatever makes them comfortable in order to live the life they want to live. What people don't understand is every day they are watched by God. If they don't believe him, that doesn't make him go away.”

•

ERICK CHARLES, 61

OBSERVED Quietly holding a sign in Grand Central Station, as he does every third Sunday.

BACKGROUND He emigrated from Haiti in 1976 and attends church in Harlem.

MESSAGE To remind people about God, and death.

“In the next hour, you don't know what's going to happen to you. Me, too. You could drop dead. We all have to go, one by one. You will meet God as your savior or your judge. We just came here for a while. After this world, there will be a new world. I know for sure everybody has to go.”

•

YAHAV GAL, 22

OBSERVED Asking passers-by, “Are you a Jew?” on a Sunday at 1 p.m. in Times Square.

BACKGROUND A Lubavitcher Hasid from Israel who was visiting Brooklyn in September for the holidays, and, “if the Moshiach” — Hebrew for Messiah — “doesn't come in the next few minutes,” planned to return to study at the movement's headquarters there.

MESSAGE To help secular Jews observe holiday rituals, like shaking the lulav last month for Sukkot.

“We try today to get Jews to say thank you to God and bless God. We hope that every mitzvah that a Jew does will bring closer the Moshiach.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 31, 2010

Because of an editing error, an article in some editions last Sunday about preachers on the New York subway misidentified the language in which “Moshiach” means messiah. The word is Hebrew, not Yiddish.

Subway Preachers Speak of God - Riders Rush By - NYTimes.com.

The Shame of New York City

The Shame of New York
By BOB HERBERT

The whole notion of the rule of law, critical to a democracy, is sabotaged when the guardians of the law — in this case the officers of the New York City Police Department — are permitted to violate the law with impunity.

The police in New York City are not just permitted, they are encouraged to trample on the rights of black and Hispanic New Yorkers by relentlessly enforcing the city’s degrading, unlawful and outright racist stop-and-frisk policy. Hundreds of thousands of wholly innocent individuals, most of them young, are routinely humiliated by the police, day in and day out, year after shameful year.

Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University and a widely recognized scholar on the subject of police and citizen interactions, has filed a report in support of a federal class-action lawsuit challenging the stop-and-frisk policy as unconstitutional. Based on analyses of the department’s own statistics, he found, as the plaintiffs and other observers have argued all along, that seizures of weapons or contraband as a result of the stops “is extremely rare.”

The rate of gun seizures is near zero — 0.15 guns seized for every 100 stops. “The N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk tactics,” wrote Professor Fagan, “produce rates of seizures of guns or other contraband that are no greater than would be produced simply by chance.”

More important, after studying six years’ worth of data, the professor concluded that many of the millions of stops are violations of the Constitution. One of a number of constitutional problems, according to Professor Fagan, is that the police frequently use race or national origin rather than reasonable suspicion as the basis for the stops.

“I provide evidence that the N.Y.P.D. has engaged in patterns of unconstitutional stops of city residents that are more likely to affect black and Latino citizens,” he wrote.

From 2004 through 2009, city police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times. Many were patted down, frisked, made to sprawl face down on the ground, or spread-eagle themselves against a wall or over the hood of a car. Nearly 90 percent of the people stopped were completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

An overwhelming majority of the people stopped were black or Hispanic. Blacks were nine times more likely than whites to be stopped by the police, but no more likely than whites to be arrested as a result of the stops.

While crime has been going down, the number of people getting stopped has been going up. More than 575,000 stops were made last year — a record. But 504,594 of those stops were of people who had committed no crime, were issued no summonses and were carrying no weapons or illegal substances.

If the stops go up when crime goes down, it’s fair to wonder what might happen if there was no crime in the city. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly might decide that it is necessary to frisk everybody. The use of such stops has more than quintupled on their watch.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the class-action suit, wants the Police Department barred from engaging in what the center describes as race-based and “suspicionless stops and frisks.”

Professor Fagan, in his report filed in connection with the suit, found that nearly 150,000 stops over the six-year period that he studied lacked any legal justification at all. An additional 544,252 stops lacked sufficiently detailed information from the officers involved to determine their legality.

I’ve no doubt that the professor’s findings are, in fact, conservative. But even his figures show the police to be violating the Constitution on a scandalously vast scale. The police use such specious justifications as “furtive movements” or an alleged “bulge” in someone’s pocket as the basis for stopping people. If you believe all those furtive-movement and bulging-pocket stories, I’ve got some antiques spanning the East River that you might be interested in.

It’s important to keep in mind that what we are talking about here, in the overwhelming number of cases, are innocent people, not criminals. No one wants to stop the police from going after the bad guys. But what keeps happening with this lousy policy is that the cops target skin color, not the likelihood that a crime might be in progress, or have taken place. As Professor Fagan found, “Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be stopped than whites, even in areas where there are low crime rates and where residential populations are racially heterogeneous or predominantly white.”

It doesn’t matter if innocent black or Hispanic kids are in a high-crime area or low, a minority area or white, they stand a good chance of being harassed by New York City cops.

The Shame of New York City - NYTimes.com.

Starbucks Acquires Remaining Interest in Magic Johnson Enterprises' Urban Coffee Opportunities

Starbucks Acquires Remaining Interest in Magic Johnson Enterprises' Urban Coffee Opportunities

Article from:
Wireless News
Article date:
October 27, 2010


Wireless News
10-27-2010
Starbucks Acquires Remaining Interest in Magic Johnson Enterprises' Urban Coffee Opportunities
Type: News

Following a successful 12-year partnership, Starbucks Corporation announced the acquisition of Magic Johnson Enterprises' remaining 50 percent interest in Urban Coffee Opportunities.

In a release dated Oct. 21, the Company said in 1998, Johnson Development Corporation (JDC), a division of Magic Johnson Enterprises, and Starbucks Coffee Company entered into a 50/50 partnership to build Starbucks stores in underserved neighborhoods. The partnership's goal was to create economic opportunity and a stronger sense of community in the neighborhoods it served.
"We are incredibly proud of the work this partnership has accomplished," said Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman, president and CEO. "Together we opened several successful locations, including our Harlem store, which led the redevelopment of that now vibrant neighborhood. The partnership helped create jobs with health benefits, build community gathering places where they're most needed, and empower change makers to innovate and take action in their communities. Thanks to this partnership, Starbucks has deepened our commitment to community development in urban areas and plans additional programs to sustain that commitment."

"Through our partnership with Starbucks, we were able to serve as an economic catalyst in urban cities through the creation of new jobs, use of local suppliers, support for community-based organizations, and by attracting other retailers to the area," said Earvin Johnson, Chairman and CEO of Magic Johnson Enterprises. "Our success also validates the loyalty and support of urban consumers to companies who bring quality products and services which meet their needs into their communities. Magic Johnson Enterprises remains committed to serving Urban America and we look forward to working with Starbucks on its community development initiatives."

Over the tenure of the partnership, more than 100 UCO locations were opened in cities including Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Starbucks stores in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, and the Crenshaw district in Los Angeles all anchored redevelopment of the areas.

Magic Johnson Enterprises serves as a catalyst for driving business results and fostering community and economic empowerment by making available entertainment, products and services that answer the demands of ethnically diverse urban communities.

Starbucks Coffee Company is a roaster and retailer of specialty coffee.

((Comments on this story may be sent to newsdesk@closeupmedia.com))

HighBeam Research.

Many Police Stops in New York Unjustified, Study Says - NYTimes.com

Study Finds Street Stops by N.Y. Police Unjustified
By AL BAKER and RAY RIVERA

Tens of thousands of times over six years, the police stopped and questioned people on New York City streets without the legal justification for doing so, a new study says.

And in hundreds of thousands of more cases, city officers failed to include essential details on required police forms to show whether the stops were justified, according to the study written by Prof. Jeffrey A. Fagan of Columbia Law School.

The study was conducted on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing the New York Police Department for what the center says is a widespread pattern of unprovoked and unnecessary stops and racial profiling in the department’s stop-question-and-frisk policy. The department denies the charges.

The study examined police data cataloging the 2.8 million times from 2004 through 2009 that officers stopped people on the streets to question and sometimes frisk them, a crime-fighting strategy the department has put more emphasis on over the years.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has rejected the accusation of racial profiling, and said the racial breakdown of the stops correlated to the racial breakdown of crime suspects. Mr. Kelly has also credited the tactic with helping to cut crime to low levels in the city and with getting guns off the street.

But as the number of stops has jumped — to more than 570,000 last year from 313,000 in 2004 — the practice has come under increasing scrutiny, from lawmakers at City Hall and Albany and from civil libertarians including the constitutional rights center and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Many Police Stops in New York Unjustified, Study Says - NYTimes.com.

Maya Angelou Archive Goes to Schomburg Center in Harlem - NYTimes.com

Schomburg Center Acquires Maya Angelou Archive
By FELICIA R. LEE

Maya Angelou’s paper trail includes a rambling, typewritten letter from James Baldwin, dated Nov. 20, 1970, addressed to “Dear, dear Sister” discussing everything from his new book to his feelings about death.

And one from Malcolm X, written on Jan. 15, 1965, assuring her, “You can communicate because you have plenty of (soul) and you always keep your feet firmly rooted on the ground.”

And a draft of her poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she recited at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton, showing Ms. Angelou’s changing the first line from “Rocks and Rivers and Trees” to the final, stark version: “A Rock, A River, A Tree.”

All of these things and more — a total of 343 boxes containing her personal papers and documents — have been acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The trove has notes for Ms. Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”; a 1982 telegram from Coretta Scott King asking her to join a celebration at the King Center; fan mail; and personal and professional correspondence with Gordon Parks, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln and her longtime editor, Robert Loomis.

The acquisition is to be officially announced on Friday by New York Public Library officials at a news conference with Ms. Angelou, said Howard Dodson, the executive director of the Schomburg.

“It will be the largest collection of her material,” Mr. Dodson said. “This is the collection that documents her literary career. This is a major, major, major addition to that body of documentation of the individual lives of writers and the worlds in which they lived.”

Library officials declined to disclose a purchase price for the collection. The Angelou papers were paid for with private money, not New York Public Library funds, at this time of budget cuts.

The papers are “a major coup for the Schomburg, which too often loses important papers to more monied institutions,” said Pamela Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University. For Professor Newkirk’s 2009 book, “Letters From Black America,” an anthology of letters written by African-Americans since the 1700s, she relied on the Schomburg archives for much of her research, she said.

The acquisition is something of a swan song for Mr. Dodson, who announced in April that he would retire in 2011. A committee is currently searching for his replacement at the Schomburg, a research library of the New York Public Library and a center for exhibitions and other cultural programs.

Ms. Angelou’s archive will become part of holdings that include some 10 million items, including the personal collections of John Henrik Clarke, Lorraine Hansberry and Malcolm X. The Schomburg, at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, is also home to the original manuscript of Richard Wright’s “Native Son” and a signed first edition by Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), who has been called America’s first black female poet.

“Nothing is as precious to me as that library,” Ms. Angelou said of the Schomburg, speaking by telephone from Winston-Salem, N.C., where she is a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.

“For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‘Here I am, read me,’ ” Ms. Angelou said. “Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.”

Ms. Angelou, 82, said it dawned on her that “I’d better make sure that my papers and books are taken care of, they are somewhere people can see them and read them.” As part of the New York Public Library, the Schomburg is “part of the world,” Ms. Angelou said, accessible to “students in the neighborhood and people in Tokyo and Germany.”

Ms. Angelou has placed papers and documentation of her theatrical, film and television performances at Wake Forest over the years, she said, but she maintains a personal connection to Harlem and the Schomburg. She owns a brownstone in the neighborhood and counts Mr. Dodson as a friend. She is also the Schomburg’s national membership chairwoman.

Her material has yet to be processed. Mr. Dodson said the contents included the yellow notepads on which Ms. Angelou typically scribbled in longhand, as well as typescripts and proofs or galleys of her published and unpublished work.

The collection will be available to researchers in about 18 months, and selected items will eventually be exhibited, Mr. Dodson said.

Ms. Angelou’s papers are a window on 40 years of the times and the work of a Renaissance woman who became known as a “people’s poet.” An outspoken advocate for the rights of African-Americans and women, Ms. Angelou is perhaps most famous for “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” her 1970 memoir of a childhood scarred by sexual abuse, as well as for her poems “Phenomenal Woman” and “Still I Rise.” She has won three Grammy Awards for her spoken-word albums, and President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2000.

Ms. Angelou said that transparency about her life and work connected her to a long African-American tradition of preserving and retelling personal history.

“Hold those things that tell your history and protect them,” she said. “During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‘I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.’ ”

Ms. Angelou said that Frederick Douglass used the first-person singular to talk about the story of a whole group of people. “It stands in for all of us,” she said. “We’ve been telling that story from the time of Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Harmon.” (Harmon was another black 18th-century poet.)

For those reasons, she said, it was not difficult to part with poignant letters from James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write “Caged Bird,” and Malcolm X, whom she met in Ghana. She worked with him to build the Organization of Afro-American Unity after he parted ways with the Nation of Islam.

The Nov. 20, 1970, letter from Baldwin includes his feelings about leaving himself “wide open” in his book of conversations on race and society with Margaret Mead (“It was painful to do and even more painful to read”) and his feelings about watching Lorraine Hansberry die, as he battled his own health problems. He says of writing another book: “What for? for whom? to whom?”

And he throws out this seeming non sequitur a few lines later: “No one will believe that I wanted children.” He ended the letter with a handwritten request: “When I option ‘Soledad Brother’ would you consider working on the scenario with me?”

Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, who will also step down in 2011, said the acquisition of the papers was a reflection of the importance of the Schomburg to the library’s mission.

“A great library,” he said, “never stops buying.”

Maya Angelou Archive Goes to Schomburg Center in Harlem - NYTimes.com.

NYTimes.com: City Room: Two Years After a Killing, a Heftier Reward for Information

This page was sent to you by:  narmer@gmail.com N.Y. / REGION   | October 23, 2010 City Room: Two Years After a Killing, a Heftier Reward for Information By ANNE BARNARD Stephanie Guerra finally won something she had been pushing for since the killing of her son, Keron Agard, in 2008: an increased reward offering $12,000 for information leading to an arrest in the case. Copyright 2010  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy

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Afghan Leader Admits His Office Gets Cash From Iran - NYTimes.com

Afghan Leader Admits His Office Gets Cash From Iran
By DEXTER FILKINS and ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai acknowledged Monday that he regularly receives bags of cash from the Iranian government containing millions of dollars, saying he uses the off-the-books fund to pay expenses incurred in the course of doing his job.

Mr. Karzai made his remarks during a rambling, sometimes incoherent appearance at a news conference during which he accused the United States of funding the “killing” of Afghans by paying thousands of gunmen at private security contractors to guard buildings and convoys here. It was the latest outburst in a bitter dispute with the United States and its NATO allies that has taken on an increasingly anti-Western tone. The Iranian payments are intended to drive a wedge between Mr. Karzai and his American and NATO benefactors, Afghan officials have said.

Duing the news conference, Mr. Karzai confirmed a report in The New York Times on Sunday that said his chief of staff, Umer Daudzai, was covertly receiving as much as $6 million in cash — often stuffed in bags — from Iranian officials.

Afghan Leader Admits His Office Gets Cash From Iran - NYTimes.com.

Parents protest potential charter expansion to UWS

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Friday 22 October 2010 12:50pm EST.

Parents protest potential charter expansion to UWS

By Jake Davidson

The charter school debate surfaced south of Harlem this week at a crowded Upper West Side Community Education Council meeting that felt more like a protest.

An auditorium at P.S. 145 on 105th Street was full for most of the meeting Wednesday night, which focused on a plan to potentially open a charter school within P.S. 145, also known as the Bloomingdale School.

The Success Academy Network, a well known charter school network that operates five schools across Harlem, has applied to open another location called Upper West Success Academy that could possibly share space in P.S. 145. The city Department of Education says that school is currently only at 59 percent capacity.

This potential location on the Upper West Side marks a shift in the charter school debate from its center in Harlem, where one in five kids now attends a charter school. Proponents of charters, which are public schools run by private boards, have argued that mission-based charter schools provide more choices for parents and superior academics, but critics claim that charters take away resources from traditional schools.

Parents on Wednesday expressed concern about the potential loss of a $11 million grant for District 3 on the Upper West Side—P.S. 145 was one of the schools selected to receive that funding to help increase school enrollment and improve racial integration. Parents and CEC members said they were worried that if P.S. 145 doesn't have room to expand, that money will be lost.

But Elizabeth Rose, director of portfolio planning at the city DOE, said that they are looking into the grant closely.

"We will not do anything that jeopardizes the magnet grant," she said, pointing out that in the magnet grant proposal, P.S. 145 only planned to increase its number of enrolled students to 623, still well under the building's 884-student capacity.

Success Academy's proposal, which does not specifically deal with its future physical placement, is currently before the SUNY Charter Schools Institute, one of the organizations that approves charters in New York State.

To parents who expressed concerns about out-of-district students creating overcrowding, Rose said that enrollment priority would be given to students south of 110th Street.

Rose continually stressed that parents in the district needed more options and referenced Success Academy's high test scores and the fact that 20 percent of its students have special needs.

Jenny Sedlis, spokesperson for the Success Charter Network, said that a new school would provide Upper West Side parents with much-needed new options. "It is so hard to find a great public school for your child. The best public schools are overcrowded and difficult to get into," she said in an email.

Still, there were loud responses when the topic of test scores was raised, and a few times, Noah Gotbaum, president of the Community Education Council, needed to call for order.

In a recent letter to the SUNY Board of Trustees, Gotbaum—who also made his anti-charter stance clear at the meeting—argued that Success Academy has moved into public schools, increased class size, and not properly addressed the needs of special education students.

John LaPolla, a former high school teacher whose child suffers from Down syndrome, also contested the idea that test scores were the best way to measure a school, especially when special needs children are involved. "Think about the value equation of this school and it's not test performance. It's the performance of human beings, some of whom have been marginalized for far too long," he said.

Tina Crockett, president of the P.S. 145 Parents Association, criticized the process. "The organization is coming in to influence the parents to come to a school which hasn't even been voted on," she said.

There was a group of pro-charter parents who cheered when Rose reminded the audience that charter schools are public schools, too.

Tensions ran high even before the meeting began when P.S. 145's principal Ivelisse Alvarez told videographers from Success Academy that they couldn't record. When they refused to stop filming, parents shouted at the cameramen and blocked their lenses.

Amidst the commotion, Gotbaum said the incident was proof that Success Academy has "a complete disregard for the laws, for the rules, for the community."

When Gotbaum told the audience that the New York City schools chancellor was currently speaking on the phone to Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy, about the incident, there was a loud uproar. "Why is the chancellor speaking to Eva?" Gotbaum asked, turning to the audience. "Does she run this school?"

The videographers were led away by police as some parents cheered. By the end of the meeting, the elementary school auditorium and lobby had around 18 school safety officers present.

Update: Jenny Sedlis from the Success Charter Network, offered a response to the incident that resulted in videographers from SCN being led out by police. Sedlis pointed to the New York State Public Officers Law, which says that any public meeting can be photographed or recorded.

news@columbiaspectator.com

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Book Review - Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans - NYTimes.com

Between Sisters
By LYDIA PEELLE

BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF

By Danielle Evans

232 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.95

Danielle Evans’s whip-smart first story collection charts the liminal years between childhood and the condition dubiously known as being a grown-up. Told from a close distance, these stories lack the rich patina of hindsight, their pleasures coming instead from an immediacy and an engaging voice. They evoke the thrill of an all-night conversation with your hip, frank, funny college roommate.

Evans follows girls and young women who are intelligent, gutsy and black. (Her few male characters orbit closely around sisters, girlfriends and daughters.) Rather than limiting the collection’s gaze, this perspective amplifies the universal pitfalls of coming of age in 21st-century America.

At a store in the mall, “girls 3 and up could get manicures.” Parents, whether two subway stops away or on a research trip in Brazil, are unaware of their transgressions. (The notion that “we are safe, with our families, until we are not” is a preoccupation here.) In Evans’s world, virginity is a card to play quickly and strategically. One character, looking after her 14-year-old cousin (Grandfather is dying, Mother is at a church retreat), sums it up heartbreakingly well: “I feel kind of sorry for her entire generation, because they’ve learned all the theatrical parts of sex so they walk around pouting and posing, . . . but not the basic mechanical processes of actual pleasure.”

This kind of voice — wry and wise, “brave the way you are when you don’t know what you have to lose” — drives the best of these stories. But the conversational tone belies careful construction. Evans likes contrasts. “Virgins” is set “the day after Tupac got shot,” giving a story of lost innocence an ominous undertone of gangster violence. In “Harvest,” a tale of prejudice and perverse cultural values, Laura, a blond college suite-mate, sells her eggs to finance a designer wardrobe while the narrator, Angel, watches with disgust and envy. “If they had wanted brown babies . . . they would have just adopted.” By the time Angel ends up at Planned Parenthood, the story’s quiet architecture is only slightly marred when Evans, who has a tendency not to trust her skill, can’t resist some neon signs: “They paid her for her potential babies, and they were about to vacuum mine out of me.”

Lines like this jar because Evans is otherwise so sagacious. She humanizes her characters with swift accuracy (Laura once “couldn’t say ‘Blow Pop’ because she thought it sounded dirty”). Equally economical is her treatment of place: these stories range over the Eastern Seaboard, settling often in the mid-­Atlantic states, where one character crashes at her family home on what remains of property “once large enough that it meant something for black people to own it.”

Evans hits a deep vein just below the Mason-Dixon, especially in her exploration of how an immigrant population has tangled the color line. “This was the new New South,” observes Crystal, the teenage heroine of the searingly honest “Robert E. Lee Is Dead.” “Same rules, new languages.” To hype up a big game, the school board hatches a rivalry between Crystal’s school, Robert E. Lee, and the recently opened Stonewall Jackson High (again, flashing neon: the football field is rumored to be a Civil War graveyard). One might expect Crystal to protest this arbitrarily incendiary move (she reads W. E. B. Du Bois on the school bus), but instead she concocts an elaborate prank in pursuit of acceptance, with disastrous results.

Fiercely independent, all of Evans’s characters struggle for a place in a world intent on fencing them out. But as her title suggests, the biggest obstacles they face are often their own selves.

Lydia Peelle is the author of the story collection “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing.”

Book Review - Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans - NYTimes.com.

Smoke and Horrors - NYTimes.com

Smoke and Horrors
By CHARLES M. BLOW

Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.’s recent chest-thumping against the California ballot initiative that seeks to legalize marijuana underscores how the war on drugs in this country has become a war focused on marijuana, one being waged primarily against minorities and promoted, fueled and financed primarily by Democratic politicians.

According to a report released Friday by the Marijuana Arrest Research Project for the Drug Policy Alliance and the N.A.A.C.P. and led by Prof. Harry Levine, a sociologist at the City University of New York: “In the last 20 years, California made 850,000 arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana, and half-a-million arrests in the last 10 years. The people arrested were disproportionately African-Americans and Latinos, overwhelmingly young people, especially men.”

For instance, the report says that the City of Los Angeles “arrested blacks for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites.”

This imbalance is not specific to California; it exists across the country.

One could justify this on some level if, in fact, young blacks and Hispanics were using marijuana more than young whites, but that isn’t the case. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, young white people consistently report higher marijuana use than blacks or Hispanics.

How can such a grotesquely race-biased pattern of arrests exist? Professor Levine paints a sordid picture: young police officers are funneled into low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods where they are encouraged to aggressively stop and frisk young men. And if you look for something, you’ll find it. So they find some of these young people with small amounts of drugs. Then these young people are arrested. The officers will get experience processing arrests and will likely get to file overtime, he says, and the police chiefs will get a measure of productivity from their officers. The young men who were arrested are simply pawns.

Professor Levine has documented an even more devious practice in New York City, where possessing a small amount of marijuana is just a civil violation (so is a speeding ticket), but having it “open to public view” is a misdemeanor.

According to a report he issued in September 2009: “Police typically discovered the marijuana by stopping and searching people, often by tricking and intimidating them into revealing it. When people then took out the marijuana and handed it over, they were arrested and charged with the crime of having marijuana ‘open to public view.’ ”

And these arrests are no minor matter. They can have very serious, lifelong consequences.

For instance, in 1998, President Bill Clinton signed a provision that made people temporarily or permanently ineligible for federal financial aid depending on how many times they had been arrested and convicted of a drug offense. The law took effect in 2000, and since 2006 lawmakers have been working to soften it. But the effect was real and devastating: the people most in need of financial aid were also being the most targeted for marijuana arrests and were therefore the most at risk of being frozen out of higher education. Remember that the next time someone starts spouting statistics comparing the number of black men in prison with the number in college.

The arrests also have consequences for things like housing and employment. In fact, in her fascinating new book, “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander argues that the American justice system is being used to create a permanent “undercaste — a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society” and to discriminate against blacks and Hispanics in the same way that Jim Crow laws were once used to discriminate against blacks.

This wave of arrests is partially financed, either directly or indirectly, by federal programs like the Byrne Formula Grant Program, which was established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 to rev up the war on drugs. Surprisingly, this program has become the pet project of Democrats, not Republicans.

Whatever his motives, President George W. Bush sought to eliminate the program. Conservative groups backed his proposal, saying the program “has proved to be an ineffective and inefficient use of resources.”

But Democrats would have none of it. In the last year of the Bush administration, financing had been reduced to $170 million. In March of that year, 56 senators signed onto a “bipartisan” letter to ranking members of the Senate Appropriations Committee urging them to restore nearly $500 million to the program. Only 15 Republicans signed the letter.

Even candidate Obama promised that he would restore funding to the program.

The 2009 stimulus package presented these Democrats with the opportunity, and they seized it. The legislation, designed by Democrats and signed by President Obama, included $2 billion for Byrne Grants to be awarded by the end of September 2010. That was nearly a 12-fold increase in financing. Whatever the merits of these programs, they are outweighed by the damage being done. Financing prevention is fine. Financing a race-based arrest epidemic is not.

Why would Democrats support a program that has such a deleterious effect on their most loyal constituencies? It is, in part, callous political calculus. It’s an easy and relatively cheap way for them to buy a tough-on-crime badge while simultaneously pleasing police unions. The fact that they are ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to barely seems to register.

This is outrageous and immoral and the Democrat’s complicity is unconscionable, particularly for a party that likes to promote its social justice bona fides.

No one knows all the repercussions of legalizing marijuana, but it is clear that criminalizing it has made it a life-ruining racial weapon. As Ms. Alexander told me, “Our failed war on drugs has done incalculable damage.”

When will politicians have the courage to stand up, acknowledge this fact and stop allowing young minority men to be collateral damage?

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

Smoke and Horrors - NYTimes.com.

Halloween Parade and Pumpkin Sail

Halloween Parade and Pumpkin Sail At the Charles A. Dana Discovery Center (inside the Park on 110th St between Fifth and Lenox Aves)

Sunday, October 24, 4:00 pm - 7:00 pm (weather permitting; no rain date)   FREE! All ages.   As the event kicks off, enjoy spooky stories with actor and storyteller Dan Kitrosser, pumpkin crafts, and a pumpkin carving demonstration with professional food carver Hugh McMahon. Then walk alongside Frankenstein in the costume parade at 5:45 pm and watch New York City’s largest pumpkin flotilla drift by on the Meer at twilight. Bring your own 5- to 10-pound jack-o’-lantern by 5:30 pm to enter it into the pumpkin sail. More details on How to Participate in the Pumpkin Sail here.   No advance registration. For more information, call 212-860-1370.   Date: Sunday, October 24, 2010 Time: 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM

“A FREE MAN OF COLOR”

FIRST PREVIEW OF

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER’S PRODUCTION OF

“A FREE MAN OF COLOR”

A NEW PLAY BY JOHN GUARE

DIRECTED BY GEORGE C. WOLFE

IS RESCHEDULED TO SATURDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 23 AT 8PM

AT THE VIVIAN BEAUMONT THEATER

OPENING NIGHT IS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18 at 6:45pm

Lincoln Center Theater (under the direction of Andre Bishop, Artistic Director, and Bernard

Gersten, Executive Producer) has announced that the first preview of its upcoming production of A

FREE MAN OF COLOR , a new play by John Guare, directed by George C. Wolfe, has been

rescheduled to Saturday evening, October 23 at 8pm. The new preview date will allow the

production, which was originally scheduled to begin previews two days earlier on Thursday, October

21, additional technical rehearsal time. Opening night remains as originally scheduled on Thursday,

November 18 at 6:45pm

A FREE MAN OF COLOR is a freewheeling epic set in 1801 New Orleans. Jacques

Cornet, the title character (played by Tony, Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning actor Jeffrey

Wright), is a new world Don Juan and the wealthiest inhabitant of this sexually charged and

racially progressive city. Jacques thinks all is well in his paradise until history intervenes, setting off

a chain of events which no one, much less this free man of color, realizes is about to splinter the

world.

In addition to Jeffrey Wright, the cast features Yao Ababio Peter Bartlett, Nicole Beharie,

Arnie Burton, Rosal Colón, Veanne Cox, Paul Dano, Sara Gettelfinger, Derric Harris, Justina

Machado, Joseph Marcell, John McMartin, Nick Mennell, Mos, Teyonnah Parris, Postell Pringle,

Esau Pritchett, Brian Reddy, Reg Rogers, Triney Sandoval, Robert Stanton, Wendy Rich Stetson,

Jerome Stigler, Senfaub Stoney and David Emerson Toney.

Flawed NY ballot could baffle voters, expert says

 

Flawed NY ballot could baffle voters, expert says

(10/22/10) NEW YORK (AP) - New York's rocky transition from mechanical voting machines to paper ballots read by optical scanners just got a little more difficult.

A legal scholar at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice says he's spotted an error in the instructions sent out with the city's sample ballot.

The instructions tell voters to fill in the oval above the name of the candidate they want to vote for.

But the Center's senior counsel, Lawrence Norden, said Thursday those instructions are wrong. He says voters should be filling in the oval below the candidate's name - not above it.

That could confuse some New Yorkers.

The city Board of Election did not return several calls requesting comment.

The old levered voting machines were replaced this year after more than four decades.

Rep. Charles Rangel's nonprofit evasive on spending - NYPOST.com

$hady Rangel zone

By ISABEL VINCENT and MELISSA KLEIN

Last Updated: 6:34 AM, October 17, 2010

Posted: 12:55 AM, October 17, 2010

Us Rep. Charles Rangel's pet nonprofit, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, controls hundreds of millions in taxpayer cash but defiantly refuses to explain its spending.

The group's tax forms are incomplete, and it has yet to release its 2009 annual report. Questions are stonewalled.

Asked about its $2.7 million loan to the troubled Alianza Dominicana for its delayed multimillion-dollar Triangle Building headquarters, UMEZ's lawyer said it was "an internal matter."

The note came due Oct. 9, but Blair Duncan would not say whether the loan was paid -- only that the UMEZ "was working with the borrower."

The UMEZ last spring approved a separate $2.6 million grant to Alianza to finish the inside of the Triangle Building, despite the objections of one of its own financial executives. That grant is now held up pending a review by its board.

Alianza CEO Moises Perez was recently forced by the city to take an unpaid leave of absence over allegations of self-dealing and financial mismanagement of the social-services nonprofit.

The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone has been in business since 1995 and is one of nine such zones created under legislation written by Rangel (D-Harlem). Their mission is to spur development in inner cities.

The UMEZ was funded with $249 million in federal, state and city money. The group has spent about 80 percent of it.

Among the bigger projects it has helped fund are the Harlem USA mall on 125th Street and the new East River Plaza.

A former UMEZ employee said the organization funds its friends and "friends of Charlie's," calling it "influence-peddling at its most basic level."

Rangel sits on the New York Empowerment Zone board, which has oversight over UMEZ decisions.

Duncan denied any political influence on decisions, saying projects "come from the ground up."

It doles out grants to organizations such as El Museo del Barrio, Studio Museum in Harlem and Apollo Theater Foundation. But a comprehensive list of grant recipients is hard to find. The group did not list them on recent tax returns as required.

The UMEZ also gives out a handful of loans every year through its Business Resources and Investment Services Center.

Several of the loan recipients have stiffed the UMEZ, including the Nubian Heritage beauty-products company, which owes $1 million, and the now-shuttered Ginger Restaurant, which owes $350,000, according to a yearly report filed with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Duncan said the UMEZ was established to provide funding to borrowers shunned by traditional banks. He said that if loans are going bad, it may try to restructure them or take ultimately legal action to recoup its money.

UMEZ President Kenneth Knuckles, a former city commissioner in the Dinkins administration, refused repeated requests for an interview. He earned $216,608 in 2008. He gets an additional $60,000 a year in deferred compensation -- and had amassed $368,998 in those future payments by June 30, 2009.

melissa.klein@nypost.com

Rep. Charles Rangel's nonprofit evasive on spending - NYPOST.com.

Assemblyman Vito Lopez's scandal stoking Hasidic sects' feud - NYPOST.com

Vito Lopez scandal stoking Hasidic sects' feud

By SARAH RYLEY

Last Updated: 12:42 PM, October 17, 2010

Posted: 1:30 AM, October 17, 2010

The battle between two Satmar Hasidic sects is about to reach biblical proportions.

The scandal engulfing Assemblyman Vito Lopez -- the most powerful ally of Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum's faction -- has created a window of opportunity for the faction led by older brother Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum to capture the highly coveted Williamsburg congregation the sibling rivals have fought over for a decade.

At stake is a $372 million real-estate empire.

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE RIVAL HASIDIC SECTS

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE REAL ESTATE AFFECTED BY THE FEUD

Operatives within the Aaroni faction -- which controls the Satmar congregation in Kiryas Joel in upstate Orange County -- told The Post that within weeks they plan to crash the Brooklyn congregation's main synagogue on Rodney Street, two Zali schools and a matzo bakery.

The bitter feud between the brothers dates to 1999, when their ailing father signed over the Williamsburg congregation to Zalman. Secular courts have refused to settle the fight, saying it's a religious matter.

When the two factions last clashed on Rodney Street, in 2005, riot police were called in.

Abe Weinberger, a board member of the Zali congregation, warned that the Aaroni plot is "only going to end up in riots."

But Aaroni official Moishe Indig said the time is ripe for another takeover attempt.

"Vito Lopez is going down; we're going up," he said, explaining that the embattled Brooklyn Democratic boss can't use his influence to prop up the Zalis anymore.

"I don't think that, in today's date, anybody will take his call."

Since Lopez became mired in scandal involving the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, a social-service empire he controls, the Aaronies have seen a remarkable turn in their political fortune.

Their candidate for district leader, Lincoln Restler, who campaigned on toppling Lopez, narrowly defeated the Zali-backed candidate on primary day.

Since the Aaronies proved they could sway elections, Gary Schlesinger, chairman of the Aaronies' nonprofit arm, UJ Care, said big-time politicians like Andrew Cuomo have visited them.

UJ Care and the Central Jewish Council received only $50,000 last year in comparison to the rival Zali-allied United Jewish Organization, which got $575,000.

And last week, a state Supreme Court judge suspended proceedings on a case over the Broadway Triangle development project in Williamsburg, pending city and federal investigations into Lopez and his affiliated nonprofits.

Broadway Triangle would have meant 160 units of affordable housing for the UJO. The Aaroni faction had joined the lawsuit to stop it.

The Zalis have also tried to block an affordable-housing project that would benefit the Aaronies -- Rose Plaza, with 226 affordable units for UJ Care, proposed by Aaroni Vice President Isaac Rosenberg.

A City Council member said David Neiderman, who heads the UJO, pressured elected officials to vote for the Broadway Triangle but against Rose Plaza and has tried to dissuade them from funding UJ Care.

"He did not want me to befriend UJ Care, he [Neiderman] talked about them all the time," the councilmember said.

Neiderman responded that public funding was "competitive" and that he opposed the Rose Plaza project on its merits.

Assemblyman Vito Lopez's scandal stoking Hasidic sects' feud - NYPOST.com.

Is It Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard or 7th Avenue? - Question - NYTimes.com

How Official Is Official?
By MICHAEL POLLAK
Published: October 15, 2010
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Q. Frederick Douglass Academy is on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at 149th Street. Yet the city’s Department of Education lists the address as 2581 Seventh Avenue. Why the old name?

A. Not every agency is on the same wavelength regarding the avenue north of Central Park that is named for the former Harlem congressman. To the Education Department, 2581 Seventh Avenue is the official mailing address, said a spokeswoman. The Postal Service agreed: 2581 Seventh Avenue is its standardized address for the school. But to the Department of City Planning, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard is the correct name.

Mail will be delivered whichever name a letter writer uses because the post office keeps a record of widely used “alias” names for streets, said Darlene Reid-DeMeo, a spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service. “Unless the street is renamed officially by the city, the address will remain as the original address in our database,” she said. She theorized that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard was an honorary name only. But it isn’t; it’s official, according to the Planning Department, which keeps the ultimate authority, the city’s official street maps. The Powell honor dates from 1974. The same official change is true for two other avenues north of Central Park: Frederick Douglass Boulevard, formerly Eighth Avenue; and Malcolm X Boulevard, formerly Lenox Avenue. A department spokeswoman said the City Council had enacted the changes, making them not just honorary but legal.

The original names, however, may be in the same landmark space in the minds of longtime New Yorkers as Sixth Avenue and the Triborough Bridge. And the commercial center of Harlem, officially Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, is still 125th Street to many Harlemites.

“The names were approved as map changes,” said Jacob Morris, director of the Harlem Historical Society. So why the discrepancy? “Official inertia,” he suggested.

Is It Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard or 7th Avenue? - Question - NYTimes.com.

Supplier recalls frozen vegetables due to glass fragments - CNN.com

Supplier recalls frozen vegetables due to glass fragments
By the CNN Wire Staff
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* The products are sold by Wal-Mart and Kroger
* Packages may contain glass fragments
* Consumers can return them to place of purchase for a full refund

(CNN) -- Packages containing frozen vegetables sold nationally by Wal-Mart and at Kroger stores in the Southeast may contain glass fragments, the supplier said Friday in announcing a voluntary recall.

While there have been no reports of injuries, the Pictsweet Co. of Bells, Tennessee, is advising the public not to eat the recalled store-brand vegetables because of the potential for harm.

Consumers should return them to the place of purchase for a full refund, Pictsweet said.

The voluntary recall covers the following items:

-- Kroger 12-ounce Green Peas (UPC 11110 89736). Production Codes of 1440BU, 1440BV, 1440BW, and 1600BD.

-- Kroger 12-ounce Peas and Carrots (UPC 11110 89741). Production Codes of 1960BD and 1960BE.

-- Great Value 12-ounce Steamable Sweet Peas (UPC 78742 08369). Best by dates of July 20, 2012; July 21, 2012.

-- Great Value 12-ounce Steamable Mixed Vegetables (UPC 78742 08026). Best by date of July 15, 2012.

Consumers with questions may contact Pictsweet toll-free at 1-800-367-7412, extension 417, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central Daylight Time, Monday through Friday.



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Supplier recalls frozen vegetables due to glass fragments - CNN.com.

Anatomy of a Roach Attack - NYTimes.com

October 12, 2010, 4:28 pm
Anatomy of a Roach Attack
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

It is among the worst nightmares of diners and restaurateurs: a roach on the table. When it happens, there are screams. And so there were at Jean Georges on Monday night. But then a finely honed roach-removal-and-memory-erasing plan went into effect. Free Champagne was involved. City Room pal Sam Sifton, over at Diner’s Journal, recounts the incident in all its creepy, crawly detail. Go read it.

Anatomy of a Roach Attack - NYTimes.com.

two important events coming up

Folks, we want you to know about two important events coming up.
 
#1. Cornel West / Carl Dix Dialogue on October 29th at CCNY - find information below or go to www.revolutionbooksnyc.org. There is an planning meeting on Wednesday, the 13th at City College, (137th Street and Amsterdam Ave.), 7pm in room 6-144, NAC building (sixth floor, room 144). Dozens of volunteers are working to make sure this important exchange is heard. Join us!

#2. October 22- The National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation is just around the corner, 10 days away. The outrageous "Stop and Frisk" policy being carried out by the NYPD needs to be exposed and resisted in a major and ongoing way. We are organizing a bear witness/speak-out rally from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. on October 22 at Saint Nicholas Park, 135th and Amsterdam Ave. Hundreds of high school students go through that park at that time. At 4 p.m. we will hop on the train and go to the O22 demonstration being held at Union Square at 4:30.  Speak out! Be a part of making all this happen in the most powerful way that it can.

Check this statement from Carl Dix http://www.revcom.us/a/214/Carl_Dix-O22-en.html. For more information on "Stop and Frisk" check http://www.revcom.us/a/212/stop_n_frisk-en.html.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 29, Friday, 7pm 

IN THE AGE OF OBAMA, part 2 
Police Terror, Incarceration, No Jobs, Miseducation: 
What Future for Our Youth? 
A Dialogue Between CORNEL WEST and CARL DIX

A Benefit Evening for Revolution Books and the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund 
Location: HarlemStage, Aaron Davis Hall, 135th & Convent

TICKETS: $20 General Admission, 
$100 Premium
For more info and buy tickets