[This text is machine generated and may contain errors.]

by Edward E stein
WASHINGTON, DC " Sixteen
House Democrats led by Rep. Lynn

Woolsey of Petaluma called on President
Bush on Wednesday to begin the im-
mediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from
Iraq, just as some administration sup-
porters are starting to question the wis-
dom of staying the course in the war.
So far, the Bush administration re-
mains publicly unshakable in its posi-
tion that the elections on Jan. 30 should
proceed despite fears about safety for
voters in parts of Iraq. The president and
other administration officials have said
U.S. forces will start withdrawing only
once U.S.-trained Iraqi forces can take
_Eesponsibility for more of the patrolling

withdrawal would be much more

phased than the departure envisioned
y the House Democrats in a letter sent

Wednesday to the president.

Privately, however, top administra-
tion officials are in deliberations about
how to proceed in Iraq, where hopes are
fading that the elections on Jan. 30 for
a national assembly to write a constitu-
tion will improve security.

The anti-war Democrats T letter was
sent as mote voices are being raised
across the political spectrum in Wash-
ington discussing how the United States
can begin to remove its 150,000 troops
from, a country where almost 1,400
Americans have been killed.

and the fighting. And even then, the °

Woolsey and the other House
Democrats, including Reps. Sam Farr
of Carmel, Pete Stark of Fremont and
Barbara Lee of Oakland, urged the ad-
ministration to move swiftly.

oWhile it may be logistically diffi-
cult to immediately remove every Ameri-
can soldier, we urge you to take imme-
diate action to begin the withdrawal of
U.S. forces from Iraq. This is the only
way to truly support our troops, ? said
the letter signed by Woolsey and her

colleagues.

e House Democrats, all of them
longtime critics of Bush Ts Iraq policies,
said the U.S.-led invasion in March
2003 had stirred anti-American senti-
ments among Iraqis and other Arabs,

Army Sergeant Refuses 2nd Iraq Deployment.

SAVANNAH, GA " On Thursday,
January 13, Sgt. Kevin Benderman, a
Army mechanic with nine years in the

service, including role in the assault on
Baghdad, has refused to return to Iraq,

claiming oyou just don Tt know how bad
itis. ?

S
Monica sit at their Hinesville, Georgia,
home. Photo: Savannah Morning News

Now seeking conscientious objec-
tor status, Benderman, 40, said he be-
posed to war after seei

came mo

WASHINGTON, DC.- The Su-
preme Court ruled that federal sen-

decades ago were unconstitutional be-
cause they violated a defendant's Sixth
Amendment right to be tried by a jury.
The court ruled judges cannot in-
crease sentences beyond the maxi-
mum that the jury's findings alone
would support. [includes rush tran-
script)

The decisions " in a pair of 5-4
rulings " handed broader discretion
to federal judges by telling them to
consider the guidelines merely as a sug-

estion. Previously, the guidelines
Fotoed judges to boost sentences based
on factors that a jury hadn't ruled on.
Now judges are permitted, but not
required to do so.

A few thousand defendants who
have already been convicted but are
appealing their sentences may have a

ance to get less prison time, but for
tens of thousands of federal prisoners
serving time in cases that had reached
final resolution, the decision will not
apply retroactively.

Tsunami Death

Toll Expected To
Surpass 200,000

With Tsunami Death Toll in In-
donesia Possibly Rising Over
200,000, Military Crackdown In
Aceh Continues

The government has imposed re-
strictions on the movement of aid
workers and journalists. Aid workers
have been told to inform the govern-
ment of their travel plans or face ex-
pulsion and to take army escorts to
most areas outside of Banda Aceh. [in-
cludes rush transcript]

Indonesia has found nearly
4,000 more bodies of tsunami victims,
taking the global death toll from last
month's disaster to over 160,000. In-
donesia was the hardest-hit country
with at least 110,000 people dead and
many thousands more are missing.
And even that count may be an un-
derestimate. Knight Ridder is now re-
porting that an official document
posted by local officials in Aceh re-
vises the casualty count to 210,000
people dead or missing. The paper
adds that rescue workers think even
that number may be low.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian mili-
tary plans to send thousands more sol-
diers into Aceh bringing the total troop
deployment ley a Bie 50,000.

In May 2003, the Meeenesien
government a massive offen-
sive against the Free Aceh Movement
ond banned most foreigners from
Aceh, but it was forced to scale back
and reopen the area last month to al-

NEWS - Page 5

. Kevin Benderman and his wife, - Pp

tencing guidelines put in place two].

he faces a possible court-martial after fail-
ing to deploy Friday with his unit.
oI told them that I refused de-
ployment because I just couldn't go
ack over there, ? Benderman said
Wednesday. oIf I Tm going to sit up

T there and tell everyone that I do not

believe in war, why would I go back
to a war zone? ?

Lt. Col. Cliff Kent, a Fort Stewart
spokesman, said Benderman was being
considered absent without leave because
he had orders to deploy to Iraq while
the Army processed his conscientious
objector claim.

oHe was AWOL from the unit's
movement, ? Kent said. oBeginning the
application process for conscientious ob-
jection does not preclude you from de-
loying. ?

Benderman has been reassigned to
a rear detachment unit at Fort Stewart
while his case is processed, Kent said.
Kent said the Army has not decided
whether to bring charges against him.

Gaining objector status is a time-
consuming process for soldiers, requir-

Earl Graves (File Photo)
by Makebra M. Anderson
NNPA, National Correspondent
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - Earl G.
Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise,
says that before selling to Time Warner,
the owners of Essence magazine should
have allowed Blacks companies to
make an offer to purchase the com-
pany.
Time Warner, the largest publish-
ing company in the world, had previ-
ously purchased a 49 percent stake in
Essence Communications, the parent
company of the magazine. With Time
Warner moving many of its people into
key positions on the business side, it
was expected that it would eventually
make a move to acquire total owner-
ship of the Black women-oriented
publication.

oIn selling their controlling inter-
est to Time Warner, CEO Ed Lewis
and the shareholders of Essence Com-
munications have made the best deal
they felt they could make. It is unfor-
tunate, however, there wasn't an open
bidding process in which Black entre-
preneurs could have made an offer for
the company and possibly preserve
Essence as a Black-owned business and
institution. There are a number of
Black entrepreneurs "including those
who own and operate BE 100s com-
panies "who had the resources and
management capability to acquire and
run Essence Communications, ?
Graves says in a statement.

The sale of Essence is part of an
accelerated trend of major Black busi-
nesses being bough by White-owned
companies, That list includes Johnson
hair products, Motown, Black Enter-
tainment Television and now Essence.
With the U.S. population expected to
grow by 50 percent over the next 50
years ~, with 90 percent of that geowth
among people of color "major White
companies are expected to increasingly
seek of buy Black companies.

Robert L. Johnson, who sold
BET to media giant Viacom, contends
that's not necessarily bad. .

In an interview with Richard
Prince, author of the oJournal-isms ?

ing meetings with counselors and a

lah with lengthy paperwork atcha f
far up the chain of command. Under
military law, a person must be opposed
to war in all forms to be considered a
conscientious objector.

oIfa person said, I Tm not opposed
to war, but I Tm opposed to the Iraq war, T
they would not qualify, ? said Louis
Hiken, an attorney with the Military
Law Task Force of the National Lawyers

Guild.

Filing an objector claim does not
prevent the Army from prosecuting sol-
diers for disobeying orders.

In May, a Fort Stewart court-mar-

tial sentenced Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia of
the Florida National Guard to a year in
prison for desertion despite his pending
objector application. Mejia filed his claim
after refusing to return to his unit in
Iraq while home on leave.

In December, a soldier who re-en-
listed with the Marines after becoming
a Seventh-Day Adventist was jailed for
refusing to pick up a gun. Cpl. Joel D.
Klimkewicz, 24, of Birch Run, Michi-

column for the Maynard Institute,

~ Johnson said, oBlack businesses will

' have to realize that to be in business

takes precedence over being Black, if
youre going to grow your business. ?

He told Prince that other Black
businesses, such as Radio One, will
eventually follow suit.

oAt the end of the day, they will
sell to the highest bidder ? who will
likely be White, ? Johnson said. oIt Ts
just a question of when. ?

Time Warner Inc. agreed to buy
the remaining 51 percent of Essence
Communications, which publishes
ESSENCE and Suede magazines, that
it didn Tt already own in a non-bind-
ing agreement that would add the
lifestyle publications to its magazine
division. Time Inc. currently pub-
lishes Time, People, Entertainment
Weekly, Sports Illustrated, InStyle,
Real Simple and Fortune magazines
among others. Time Inc. bought the
other 49 percent of Essence Commu-
nications in 2000.

oSince I Tm a proponent of Black
entrepreneurship, it's sad that it Ts [Es-
sence Communications] is no longer
a Black-owned company, but in re-
cent years there have been more part-
nerships between Black owned com-
panies and general market companies
to fulfill the goals that. both sides
have, ? says Yanick Rice-Lamb, former
editor of Heart & Soul and BET
WeekEnd magazines. oFrom every-
thing I Tve heard, it has been a win/
win situation for Essence and Time.
Essence will be able to leverage some
of Time's resources, which will ensure
that it will last longer and even en-
dure into the next millennium. ?

Some say that should not be the
only consideration.

oIt reminds me of when Bob
Johnson sold BET to Viacom. You
can't blame Bob for worrying about
his bottom line and I don't have the
right to demand of him to take losses,
but I Tm still upset that we lost some

reat magazines like Emerge and YSB
in the process. Essence has always
been a clear voice for Black women
and you have to be concerned that
the focus of the magazine will start to
blur, ? said Joe Ritchie, professor of
journalism and Florida A & M Uni-
eave oWhen Time Inc. bought the
first 49 percent, it was already a little
worrisome, Essence has always been
about the images of Black women in
America and in the Black Diaspora.
Having that image under total con-
trol of White media is troubling. ?

Ed Lewis, Chairman and CEO
of Essence Communications and Pub-
lisher of Essence magazine said in a
statement that the partnership with
Time Inc, will strengthen Essence.

oOnce the deal has been ap-

roved and we become and ful
edged member of the Time Inc. fam-
ily, we're looking forward to nggrcs-
sively broadening the scope of the
lf

ry

- officials to honor Martin Lu

Eastern North Carolina's Minority Communit

made Iraqis and foreigners in the coun- :

try less safe and ointensified the rage of
the extremist Muslim terrorists. ?

oBy removing our troops from the
country, we will remove the main focus
of the insurgents T rage, ? the letter added.

Woolsey spokeswoman Susannah °

Cernojevich said only logistical factors
prevented Woolsey from calling on Bush

to immediately withdraw all the force.
oIf she had her way, they would

leave now, ? she said of Woolsey.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, in

an interview aired Wednesday on Na-

tional Public Radio, said the adminis- -

tration hoped the elections would make

Iraqi security forces more willing to fight,

which would allow U.S. forces to begin
|

to leave. However, Powell wouldn't

gan, told his superiors he was a consci-
entious objector and cited his new reli-
gious status. It was rejected in March

_ 2004.

Benderman served in Iraq from
March to September 2003 with the 4th
Infantry Division based at Fort Hood,
Texas. When he later transferred to the
3rd Infantry at Fort Stewart,
Benderman said, he was already ques-
tioning the morality of the destruction
he had witnessed.

oYou can sit around your house and
discuss this thing in abstract terms, but
until you see and experience it for your-
self, you just don Tt know how bad it is, ?
he said. oHow is it an honorable thing
to teach a kid how to look through the
sights of a rifle and kill another human
being? War is the ultimate in violence
and it is indiscriminate. ?

Asked why he waited until a week
before his unit deployed to file notice of
his objector claim, Benderman said, oIt
takes time for you to make sure that you
100 percent want to do things. This is
not something you make a snap judg-
menton. ?

Essence brand and penetrating new
markets around the world, ? he said.
oIt will give me great pride and com-
fort to know that Essence will be se-
cure for generations to come and that
its prospects for even greater success
with be brighter than ever. ?

Lewis will remain on board as
non-executive Chairman and
Founder of Essence and current
Group Publisher, Michelle Ebanks,
will become President of Essence
Communications.

Some of the most successful me-

Jesse Jackson Backs Off

by Louise Chu
A A (AP) " The Rev. Jesse Jack-
son backed off Monday January 10, from

ing for a financial boycott of Colum-
bus, Ga., over the handling of a deputy Ts
fatal shooting of a black man.

The civil rights leader caught some
local activists off guard last month when
he asked that people across the country
pull their money out of financial institu-
tions based in the city until the deputy
who shot Kenneth Walker is federally
prosecuted and Georgia adopts anti-ra-
cial profiling legislation. He now says such
a boycott would only be used as a last
resort if negotiations Gil

oWe would hope that that would
not be necessary, but that burden is upon
the officials, business and corporate ex-
ecutives who live in Columbus, ? Jackson
said from New York in a conference call
with reporters.

oHopefully the citizens of goodwill
and good judgment in Columbus can
make that escalation unnecessary, ? he
added.

Jackson, founder and president of
the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, made the
remarks as he discussed two marches he
plans to lead Saturday.

The first will be held in his home-
town of Greenville, S.C., urging county

ther King Jr.
with a paid holiday for workers. The fed-
eral holiday is celebrated on the third
Monday of] anuary and Greenville is the
only county in South Carolina without a
King holiday.

Later Saturday, Jackson plans to be
in Columbus, Ga., for a march calling for
justice in the death of the 39-year-old

alker, who was shot by Muscogee
County sheriff's Deputy David Glisson
during a Dec. 10, 2003, traffic stop.
alker and three friends were riding
in a sport utility vehicle that was seen leav-
ing an apartment that was under surveil-
lance b Metro Narcotics Task Force
nts for drug activity.
o Officers erdered the four men from
the vehicle, and during that time Walker
was shot twice in the head. No drugs of T
ns were found in the vehicle, on
Walker or on the other men.

Glisson was fired after the shooting,
but last November a grand jury opted
not to bring charges.

oThe citizens of that state must
roundly renounce what did happen and

ies Since 1988 & ai
1Complimentary Issue &

iPlease Take One®

LTOGEN RANCH esi)

Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) above, who is a 6th-term Demoorat from.
California who calls the War in Iraq a oJourney into Madness ? has in the led is
signing a letter to President Bush insisting that he withdraw troops now. Am ong

Nol. 17 _ Issue 16- Jan, 15-31, 2008. J

those who joined in the signing were Danny Davis (IL), Jesse Jackson, Jr, (Ij)
pictured above, Lane Evans (IL), Sam Farr (CA) Raul Grijalva (AZ), Alege

Hastings (FL), Maurice Hinchey (NY), Dennis Kucinich (OH), Barbara Lee
(CA), John Lewis (GA), Jim McDermott (WA), Grace Napolitano (CA), Majér

4
a4

Owens (NY), Jose Serrano (NY) and Pete Stark (CA). 3

mention any numbers or give any time-
table.

oIt's not possible right now to say
that by the end of 2005, we'll be down
to such and such a number, ? Powell
said. oIt really is dependent upon the
situation. ?

The Woolsey letter came just a
week after Brent Scowcroft, who was
national security adviser under Bush's
father, President George H.W. Bush,
said in a Washington speech that the
continuing insurrection in Iraq meant
it was time for a discussion of owhether
we get out now. ?

And the Associated Press reported
that conservative Rep. Howard Coble,
R- N.C., who supported the decision
to invade Iraq, also said last week it was

dia companies that remain Black-
owned include Tom Joyner Ts Reach
Media, Radio One Inc., which is
headed by Alfred Liggins and
Catherine Liggins Hughes, Black En-
terprise, which run by Earl Graves
and Johnson publishing, which pub-
lishes Ebony and Jet magazines.

Despite concerns that Black-
owned businesses are a risk, most un-
derstand that business is always about
the bottom line.

oThe magazine business has be-
come more difficult over the years be-

what is now becoming a pattern in Co-
lumbus, ? Jackson said. oI Tm convinced
that the political leadership and corporate
leadership can join us in demanding that
the man who killed Kenneth Walker face
justice. ?

But some activists, including local
Urban League President Reginald Pugh,
still insist an economic boycott, or even
the threat of one, is the wrong way to seek
justice in the case.

oThe people in Columbus haven't
done anything wrong. Local officials,
elected officials have done everything the
community has asked them to do in the
Kenny Walker case, ? Pugh said. oHow

time to start pondering a phased with-
drawal in light of the American casual-
tiesinIraq. . -

oT got fed up with picking up the
paper and reading 12 to 15 Americafi
soldiers killed, ? he was quoted as saying.
oHow many will we lose tomorrow? ?

oI dont think anyone is seriously
considering withdrawing at this juac-
ture, ? Coble added. oThe time has come
for Iraqi people to assume more respon-
sibility. .
Coble Ts statement that Iraqis should
assume more of the military burden re-
flects long-standing Bush administra-
tion policy aimed at training tens of thou-
sands of Iraqis to serve in their country Ts

See DEMOCRATS DEMAND Page 8

cause it takes a lot of money to run a
magazine and it takes a long time to
make a.profit. Essence would have
continued to remain strong, but since
Time is so large and has so many suc-
cessful publications there is no wa
they can Tt benefit from that, ? she said.
oYou're always going to get criticism
anytime you merge with a larger cor-
poration "whether it Ts Black- owned
or not because people like to see Black-

owned companies. We have the time-

See PUBLISHER - Page 8

Boycott Over Georgia Police Shooting

can you hold the citizens of Columbus
responsible for decisions they didn't make
or even have control over? ? _

Two of Columbus largest financial
institutions - insurance giant Aflac and
Synovus Financial Corp. - did not imme;
diately return calls seeking comment. : «

Jackson dismissed critics, saying that
he and others participating in Saturday's
march were representing the best inter-
ests of the community.

oYou cant very well celebrate the King
holiday and then not commit yourself to
nonviolent social direct action to explore
problems and solve them. This is Dr.

ing Ts tradition. ?

Scholarship Endowment Event Scheduled

GREENVILLE, NC - Once

to Honor Dr. Andrew Best, M.D, .

in itis now time for our 22nd Annual Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr. Senior Recognition Banquet which pays tribute to Dr, King and the
senior minority medical students at the Brody School of Medicine. This tradition
continues this year with the event being held at the Greenville Hilton on Januaby
22nd at 7:00pm. Sponsors of the event expressed excitment in having Dr Andrew
Best, a retired family practitioner to help officiate at the event. Dr. Best, who ptat
ticed in Pitt County for almost 50 years, played a key role in the establishment of the
School of Medicine at East Carolina University during his tenure as a member of the
University of North Carolina Board of Governors and the ECU Board of Trustees.
He has also worked tirelessly as a civil rights leader, helping to integrate ECU. Dr. Best
has also contributed extensively to the development of young people in Greenville
area. For the past several years, the main purpose of this event is to endow a medical

scholarship to honor the work of Dr. Best and accordingly the Brody School of

Medicine (BSOM) would like to present the endowed scho:

ip to honor Dr, Best

on January 22, 2005. The goal for this year is an on going effort is to raise $25,000,
According to officials endowment forms can be picked up in advance from Virginia
Hardy, Ph.D at the Brody School Of Medicine, 600 Moye Blvd, 2N64 Brody

Building in Green ville.

(FILE PHOTO: Pictured in the center is Dr. Best flanked by friends durin ge

recent event.)

oPage 2 The Minority Voice Newspaper January 15 - 31, 2004

nm , | Ss
i

. ice. ? : : 3

NPA eo, n Co 3 . : pre ional Les President Marc Morial,
W. GTON (NNPA ~ Retired Congresswoman handedly raised the profile and aspirations of all those newly empowered Blacks One long-time public servant, National Urban League Presid . ?
Sty Cake ONY) ee a ne seroma and women of that era, ? states. oToday, her visionary in Con Se ee work of Shisley Chisholm made Anserica «bese place ft all Ameri
to Congress and a 1972 presidential candidate, is being and her quest for the presiden continue to inspire new generations of young _ cans, She remains a beacon for all who believe in the Ametican dr ne cadet
5 hailed in death as a die-hard heroine for justice and equa minorities and women to higher aspirations in public service. ? _ TransAfrica President and CEO Bill Fletcher issued a challenge ed on her
ity. er Te : One of those women is U. S. Rep. Barbara L (D-Calif.), who calls Chisholm " memory. - a ; - alleen ai
"Chisholm, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., died at her 2 friend and mentor. | zn os or oMs. Chisholm was an individual who } ihericy sie erica nok of
wtp aras Ga ena Becn er Sil rg he derminton and Shee ed bck deca Them
Re T commitment to justice were an inspiration to a en- Ose WhO at hid : a
was i i mule tata soba taeda de peveral pokes and eration, ? Lee sentes oI would never have iin: . '. In her life after politics, Chisholm was given

reported in Anorinaeting , ng to relatives.
But those who worked closely with one of the founding members of the

volved with politics if she had not run for President ?
Se arace Black Caucus remember her as healthy, feisty outspoken advocate
~ a 4 ;

an endowed wh Hadley M at Mount Holyoke |
in 1972. ?

_ College in South Hadley, Mass. She taught there

* Woiceless j i i | four years before traveling extensively on
for iceless in . . Lee, elected in 1998, 15 years after Chisholm « » for four y in 1993, Precblon
- mace ~ . .. da is Shirley, breaking a barrier, retired, has since earned her own ation for cour- © _ speaking engagements. In » Presi

apiertonpenen ney guts to yo for broke onda T for paar age. In 2001, she was the only maetaber of Congress. - Clinton nominated her to become le
dent, effect she had was to encourage » encourage people who were t0.vote against a resolution giving President Bush a _ -_ Sador to Jamaica, but she declined because
down and out to understand that without foe you could rea batiers ? says free hand in fracting militarily to the September 11. Outgoing, Congresional Black Caucus
e a Eleano olmes Ni le . 7 : terrorist : . ov *
° peepee oy in New York when Chisholm _It Ts easy to see why Lee admited Chisholm. _ o Chairman Elijah Cummings also reflected on
first ran for Congress in 1972 inst James Fatmer, former chair of the Congressof _. oMy greatest political asset, which professional. Chisholm Ts impact on the future. "We must re-
Racial Equality (CORE), how Chisholm was ridiculed simply for running., politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all - main vigilant in our efforts to remain true to her
oThe contribution that Shirley Chisholm made to America ally was her kinds of things one shouldn't hapeer for rea- vision o creatin 7 America that affords equal-
feminism, ? Norton says. o 2 and appealed dice . Sons of political expediency, ? Chisholm said. ©. ity and just to all of its citizens.
She was an pc poleician who fet het eat without any diffi ty People A pa supporter of the Equal Rights Amend- Chisholm fought for unemployment insur-
Chisholm spent 25 yeatsin politics, including four years'as a state assembly- ment (ERA), she was an outspoken critic of gender ance for domestic workers, increased educational
woman in New York from in the mid-1960s and in 1969 begit ning the first of bias. Ive al discs beine am assistance for poor students and programs for
in Congress. The title of i ~ . bossed " T t more discrimination being a __ - women and children. 5
was pethape the bot deepsea ey va rend woman than being Black, ? she told the Associated 4 _. The impact of Chisholm Ts 1972 run for the
oThose of us who served with her in the New York State Assembly and watched Press shortly before retiring from Congress. oWhen I - presidency extended beyond politics, says Demo- .
her career in the House, to which she was elected in 1968, knew of her boldness ran for een r me et discrimination as a ae nae Committee Chairman Terry
ic itment, ? recalls U. S. Rep. les Rangel, who served with woman t bei en are men. ? * wuliffe,
ch olm for 13 yeas. reeals 1S. Rep. Charles who ferved wi Chisholm is beinny lavishly praised this week by She inspired countless others to knock down
But says even New Yorkers were awed when she refused her first men and women. the barriers to equality. Her roots were in educa-
Congressional assignment to the Agriculture Committee. As a newly-elected repre- oShe ran for the U.S. residency, ? recalls Jesse __ tion and the lessons from her life will resonate for
sentative from an urban area, Chie saw no advahtage in serving on acommit- Jackson, who has been both a political insider and ~ generations to come.

tee that focused on rural America. She ultimately wo
Sammitee, 4 position that grew in prominence with

from Louisiana for House majority
Education and Labor Committee.

She would later set her sight on the White
cratic nomination to George McGovern,

election by Richard Nixon.

ing all accepted practices of politics, this very junior member of the

Harold Ford, Jr.

oYou have to understand people
- like George Bush. He's a nice guy. We
need to learn from him. what
Bill Clinton did: He figured out what
Republicans were doing well, and in-
stead of complaining aout it, he fig-
ured out a way to do it better. ? - Rep.
Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN)

The Black body politic has been
invaded by corporate money, which
seeks ag its media artns to sélect a
onew ? Black leadership from among a
small group of compliant and corrupt
Democrats. Memphis Congressman
Harold Ford, Jr. is a principal vector of

he disease, an eager acolyte of the cor-
porate-funded Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC), and now the point man
- among Black Democrats in the Repub-
lican mission to destroy Social Security.

Ford should also be known as the
oBlack Man Whe Dances With Blue

- one of only two Black congres-
nti members othe Blue D. Demo.
cratic Coalition (the other Black and
Blue Dog is Georgia Rep. Sanford

Bishop). C-span co ional scholar
Ilona Nickles aptly describes the Blue

Dogs as ocloser in purpose to a former
ition of southern Members of the
House known as the Boll Weevils, T
whose heyday was in the early 1980's,
These Members defected as a grou
from the Democratic party to vote with
Congressional Republicans on budget-
ary and tax bills. ?

Harold Ford is preparing to defect

the Democratic and Congressional
Black caucuses in service to George
Bush's Social Security privatization
scheme, which he has embraced in prin-
ciple. Blue Dog and DLC
congresspersons form the core of the
Democrats that Ford hopes will join
Republicans, like South Carolina Sena-
tor Lindsay Graham, oto create an own-
ership society in a variety of creative ways,
and move away from if you're bo
privatization, you're with the Republi-

if you're against it, you're with

the Democrats, ? in Ford Ts words.

oOwnership society ? is, of course,
the slogan George Bush has deployed
in his campaign to transfer trillions of

Social Security dollars to Wall Street.

Fa

Walter Fields, Esq.
7 Get Ready For the Wave of De-
struction
Well it Ts here. After a tumultuous
2004 the New Year was ushered in with
a natural disaster of Biblical proportion
= an ocean borne earthquake that
a tidal wave, or tsunami, in
Indian Ocean that engulfed several
nations along the Asian, Indian and Af-
rican coastlines. With the death toll still
mounting, the natural disaster quickly
Snane the top seory ofler peas tnd
all we know may be the leading news
story of 2005,
In many ways the notion of being
swept under by seemingly immovable

forces seems as a description of
what many Black American are cur-

Coming off a presi-

ion in which a majority of
Americans took issue with the
| $ decision to wage war in Iraq,
ind began to question Mr. Bush's ratio-
male for invadi a. country unprovoked
y its government but still said moral

or.

over John Conyers, an African-

White House guru Karl Rove must be
giving Harold Ford copies of Bush Ts
scripts. The 34-year-old congressman
has been mimicking Bush on Social Se-
Curity since at least April of last year, when

rd. addressed a forum organized by
Centrists.Org, the Concord Coalition,
the Committee for a Responsible Fed-

n a seat on the Veteran Affairs
the escalation of the Vietnam

It was not the first or last time she would buck the

ported Hale Boggs, a White Co

system. The political
maverick from Bedford-Stuyvesant sup

rican
_from Detroit. When Boggs won, she was rewarded with a seat on the powerful

House. She lost the 1972 Demo-
who was badly beaten in the general

outsider. oShe had a vision for America. She was ||
acutely aware of the role women had to play. She was ~
from the Caribbean Islands, which gav

of worldview. She fo

e her asense - |
t for the Caribbean, for Af-

rica, for those who did not have a voice. ?

Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) called her oone

of the founding mothers of the modern

-day Black political movement. ?

He explains, oShe made it possible, she created the climate for the Rev. Jesse

Jackson, the Rev. Al S

harpton and all those who will

ill come " men and women from

every walk of life " who will run for U.S. president. American politics will always be
indebted to Shirley Chisholm for extending its reach beyond the mainstream to
include the best and brightest minds among us in the important work of public

state's DLC; and Albert R. Wynn
(MD),who is proud to have orepresented
the Co onal Black Caucus on the
[House Democratic] Caucus Democratic
Leadership Council. ?

Not all of these tainted Black poli-
ticians will abandon the historical Black

Political Consensus to support

eral Budget at the New America Foun- opiraization of Social Security - the

dation, and the Alliance for Worker Rise
tirement Security, The latter is a front

set up by the National Association of ,

Man rs cally to un

Social Secunity. jSaocim Aad is the Blue
Dog Coalition's think tank, the Con-
cord Coalition opposes oentitlements ? of
all kinds and spreads hysteria about the
coming obankruptcy ? of Social Security,
while the New America Foundation Ts
Committee for : Res wat Federal
Budget is a public policy ctory for a
mine DLC Democrats and omoderate ?
Republicans. All are slaves of corporate

nding.

What do these people have to do
with ear mostly Black constitu-
ents in the 9th Congressional District in
Memphis, Tennessee? Nothing. They are
denizens of purely corporate constructs
that share no constituencies on Ford Ts
home turf or in any significant sector of
Black America. The congressman has
journeyed far afield to inhabit a
Neverland much more dangerous and
alien to Black interests than anything
Michael Jackson could conjure or imag-
ine. Harold Ford has crossed over to the
corporate side of the world, beyond re-
demption. And he Ts not alone. As we
wrote in our December 2, 2004 Cover
Story, oBlack Dems Must Clean Up
Their Own Act o:

oOne-fifth of the CBC are mem-
bers of the DLC. These include Harold
Ford, Jr. (TN)...Artur Davis (AL), ben-
eficiary of the 2002 corporate cash of-
fensive that also ousted Cynthia
McKinney in neighboring Georgia;
David Scott (GA), possibly the most con-
servative-voting member of the CBC,
also a 2002 Black oNew Democrat ?:
Gregory Meeks (NY), Juanita Millender-
McDonald (CA) and James E. Clyburn
(SC), an otherwise decent man who nev-
ertheless finds it useful to co-chair his

cing Our Own T

clarity was foremost in their choice of
candidate, Blacks appear to be lost in
the wilderness; a forty-year leaderless
sojourn coming as it does sandwiched

n two symbolic anniversaries "
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.

% as the United States commits
close to a half billion in aid for the relief
effort in Asia, as they should, I cannot
help but be somewhat distracted by the
ideological tsunam: that has over-
whelmed many Blacks in the United
States. Last year we learned once again
of the horrific consequences of
otough on crime ? laws as statistics re-
vealed the aftermath: more than a third
of all state and federal prisoners are
Blacks and some ten percent of all Black
men between the ages of 25 and 29 are
imprisoned. Compounding incarcera-
tion rates has been the relentlessness of
the Bush economy on Blacks secking
entry into the labor market. Double-

igit unem| t, at rates twice that
of whites, and long périods out of the

ogram of the New Deal -

yafiput Harold TFord has already sprihted
across

t divide. Ford's personal
ambitions and utter lack of principle
have propelled him beyond the bound-
aries of the Black Consensus and, there-
fore, outside of the African American
conversation. The problem is: Black
people don't ed the terms of their
own conversations. Corporate domin-
ion over media is just as endemic to the
Black airwaves and print outlets as to
general media, and these media corpo-
rations celebrate crossover dreams even
when they are the product of treachery
against historical and current Black as-
are troub lacks,
ore troubling, pr ive Blacks,
including the Tharp the Con-
essional Black Caucus (out of 43) that
Belong to the Congressional Progressive
Caucus, are loathe to confront treason
in the ranks, and thus allow malefactors
like Harold Ford to work their show for
the rich white corporate folks, without
olitical penalty. Ford Ts constituents in
Mem his don't even know that he Ts stab-
bing them in the back. Yet Harold Ford Ts
cut ts the deepest cut of all: oI'ma Demo-
crat because I think we are more often
right, ? Ford told the Nashville Scene,
back in March. oBut there are some
things some Democrats believe that I
don't. I don Tt think government is an
insurance p 5)
With that statement, the well-edu-
cated but ill-raised Harold Ford reveals T
that he either misunderstands or opposes

. the very premise of Social Security,

which is an insurance program against
the vissisitudes of the stock market,
On August 14, 1935, President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt described his
new Social Security Act to the U.S. Con-
gress in these words:
o[It] represents a cornerstone in a

workforce has come to be the experi-
ence of many Blacks under this admin-
istration. And there does not appear to
be much good news on the horizon,
not with the notion of a ojobless recov-
ery ? becoming widely accepted.

The undertow has also dredged
up statistics that make clear the
Stoapag poor health. Research re-
ported at the end of the year revealed
that almost 900,000 African-Americans
deaths during a ten-year period could
have been avoided had people received
the same quality of health care as whites,
It was a striking reminder of how rac-
ism has life and death consequences,
Meanwhile, AIDS is ravaging Black
America and taking a particularly harsh
toll on heterosexual African-American
women, a fact that exposed the igno-
rance of Vice President Dick Cheney
during the vice presidential debate
when he claimed to be unaware of this
crisis. Trailing HIV/AIDS, but still of

t significance for Blacks, is asthma,
diabetcs, and heart disease. And though

Her life, captured in a television documen-
tary titled, oChisholm T72: Unbought and
Unbossed, ? will be shown PBS stations in Feb-

Lee says, oShirley's willingness to challenge

the stattis quo changed Congress and the face of
American politics, ? says Lee. oShe fought the good fight T and she remained unbossed

and unbought. T

Looking forward to the time that she would no longer be on earth, Chisholm

said she did not want to be remember.

?

congressman

like to be remembered. ?

Point Man for

structure which is being built but is by
no means completed - a structure in-
tended to lessen the force of possible
future depressions, to act as a protection
to future administrations of the Gov-
ernment against the necessity of goin

deeply into debt to funding relief to the
needy, a law to-flatten out the and
valleys of deflation and of inflation -i

other words, a law that wilf tile
human needs

structure of vastly greater soundness, ?

Social Security was conceived asan

insurance policy against the inevitable
booms and busts of capitalism - eco-
nomic tremors, and sometimes earth-
quakes, that wreak excessive damage
among African Americans like Harold
Ford's Memphis constituents. In his zeal
to position himself to run for Bill Frist Ts
Senate cm in 2006, Ford would de-
?,? last major government pro
thar gives the United States any, claim 0

civilization among industrial nations. He

is already embarked on a crime of his-
toric proportions,
ord has enlisted in a multi-trillion
dollar scam, oa fake solution to a fake
crisis, ? as Princeton University econo-
mist and New York Ames columnist Paul
Krugman puts it. There is no ocrisis ? in
Social Security, but the Bush adminis-
tration is determined to create one at the
cost of trillions of dollars in order to de-
stroy the last major vestige of Roosevelt's
New Deal while filling the coffers of their
Wall Street patrons, oThe date at which
the trust fund will run out, according to
Social Security Administration (SSA)
rojections, has receded steadily into the
ture, ? writes Krugman in a special is-
sue of the scholarly journal, Economists T
Voice. oTen years ago it was 2029, now
its 2042. As Kevin Drum, Brad DeLong,
and others have pointed out, the SSA
estimates are very conservative, and quite
moderate projections of economic
growth push the exhaustion date into
the indefinite future. ?

The promise made to aging Ameti-
cans (that is, all of us) under the Social
Security program is the same one made
to foreign holders of American debt: you
will be paid. What George Bush and

often categorized as a criminal justice
issue, gun violence is a public health
crisis that has eae Black neigh-
borhoods throughout the nation.

As the 109th Congress convenes
changes in the federal financial aid pro-
gram for college students " the Pell
Grant - will mean many young people
will received reduced assistance, and
some will be excluded altogether, at a
time when many colleges and universi-
ties, public and private, are increasin
tuition and fees, At the secondary leve
the maddening push for higher test
scores is producing a generation of test
driven drones who are ill equipped to
fully exercise their God given intellect.
And many urban school districts, un-
der pressure from Mr. Bush's No Child
Left Behind Act and suburban con-
trolled state legislatures, are seeing little
light at the end of the tunnel.

Then there is the matter of Mr.
Bush's war, courtesy of Rumsfeld Inc.
Any sane assessment of what has tran-
spited in the Persian Gulf region will
call it for what it is ~ an unmitigated
disaster. And an arrogance of power in
the Oval Office and a complicit news
media are to blame. Whatever hap-

ahd at the same'time pro= ?
vide for the United States an ¢¢onomic *'|

ed for being the othe first Black woman

surrogates like Harold Ford are threat-
ening - and it isa monstrous threat - is to
renege on Americans who have contrib-
uted heavily into payroll taxes for most
of their lives, while maintaining obliga-
tions to the foreigners who finance
chronic U.S. debt. Both Social Security
and the offshore debt are secured by the
ofull faith and credit ? of the American
government. That means, in Krugman Ts
analysis, owe can't have a Social Security
crisis without a general fiscal crisis - un-
less Congress declares that debts to for-
eign bondholders must be honored, but

that promises to older Americans, who

pened to those weapons of mass destruc-
tion that Mr, Bush claimed we had irre-
futable evidence of their existence?
Where was that imminent threat in a
country that obviously did not have a
Sea de strong enough to harm
its neighbors or pose a grave danger to
the United States? Where was the cred-
ible connection between Saddam
Hussein and Osama bin Laden? And
justifying this mess in the name of
spreading democracy is laughable in a
country where the process of electing
of our own leader is now looked upon
with suspicion by a large segment of
the citizenry. The behavior of some of
our military at Abu Ghraib prison and
the U.S, Naval Base detention facility
at Guantdnamo Bay, Cuba, the resis-
tance of many to reenlistment, and the
outright opposition by some men and
women in uniform is the legacy of this
Rumsfeld-Cheney-Rice collabo. The
Bush tsunami in the Persian Gulf has
claimed the lives of almost 1400 Ameri-
can men and women military person-
nel, by all accounts over 100,000 inno-
cent Iraqi children, and created a giant
portal for terrorist activity in Iraq.

So now the wave is just three weeks

- column.

have spent most of their working lives
paying extra Payroll taxes to build up

the trust fund, don Tt count. ?

Social Security is, in fact, the great
scapegoat for the Bush Pirate regime's
current and future corporate raids on
the U.S. economy. oThe long-term cost
of the Bush tax cuts is five times the
budget office's estimate of Social
Security's deficit over the next 75 years, ?
writes Krugman, in his New York Times

he botched prescription

Point Man

Continued on Page 3

from coming ashore in the nation Ts capi-
tal as George W. Bush, in the irony of
ironies, places his hand on the Bible and
is sworn in for a second term. Caught
in the current are thousands of Black
families, parents struggling to make
ends meet, children trapped in failing
schools, young men enticed by the un-
derground economy because legitimate
eras are few and far between,
an young women who are fighting for
survival. And there appears to be lice
relief on the way for b ack Americans,
many of whom are continually swim-
ening corinet the tide and some who
will be swept up in the undertow.

Walter Fields, Esq. s the CEO of
the North Star Network and former the
Director of Public Affairs for the New
York State Trial Lawyers Association, Mr.
Fields is a frequent guest on national
and local public affairs programs, in-
cluding CNBC's oHardball with Chris
Matthews, ? MSNBC Ts oEqual Time, ?
Fox News Channels oThe O'Reilly Fac-
tor, ? oAmerica's Black Forum, ? and
oHannity & Colmes, ? oBET Tonight ?
and Court TV's oPros & Cons, ?

She said, oI'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That's how I'd

His Dream

On August 28, 1963, in the
nation Ts capitol before the Lincoln
Memorial, and in particular facing the
Washington Monument, better known
as the Egyptian symbol of the Sun, the
Obelisk, Martin Luther Kin Jr.
delivered to a crowd of 250,000 bylan
and millions more by television the
public decree: democracy and freedom

long, not to some, but to all men,

women, boys and girls.

Need anyone remind the other _

that neither the spirit of confusion nor
that or chaos was powerful enough to
coup the planned celebration of our

Almighty God in Heaven on that day.

For on that day Martin stood on the top »

of the mountain and parted the Red Sea
for our maiden voyage. In so doing he
freed the spirit, body and mind of a
people entrapped by an unrepentant
suckling eye her name, trade and
commerce.

The echoing phrase, oI Have a
Dream T, and its ensuing message became
King Ts indelible mark of distinction, to

Beyond Elections: Dr.

on

is no discussion taking place in the world
today that is more crucial than the debate
TEE

ere is no great ist in Ameri-
can histo tua teacher ioe balavar

m
tics.

's teachings on strategy and tac-

In the late 1950s a major change
took place within the civil rights commu-
nity, a shift from representative govern-
ment to direct action democracy. When
the young Black movement broke away
from the confines of electoral politics, so-

ci to change.

Re re 1960, ohanes was the
most igious civil ri ts organization
in the US. Ithandled legal case achieved
an historic victory in Brown v Board of
Education, and carried out valuable work
within the normal channels of govern-
ment " Congress and the courts. Its lead-
ers were drawn Primarily ily from the profes-

sional class, and its ap roach to -
wes widen perma droaton nets
was respected S.,
it did not have a mass base in the South.
The rise of mass-action strategy
changed the course of history. It was a

boycott " the Montgomery bus boy-

Southeast Asia

by Wilbert A. Tatum

There is no way that we can ad-
equately describe the tragedy that oc-
curred on two continents and seven
countries in Southeast Asia. At last
count, there were an estimated 150,000
people killed, at least 30% of them chil-
dren. There is no way at this point that
we can tell how high the toll will go.
But certainly it will be as many as
200,000 and perhaps even 400,000
after the count for those who were killed
by disease, accidents, and poor health

er the tragedy occurred.

a anid vinion to

The
Minority Voice
Newspaper
is Published by
The Minority Voice, Inc.
Jim Rouse
Publisher/Founder
_ Galus O. Sims, Sr.
Operations /Editor

Home Office

. perienced one for at
that

| peace and equity movement have
Bs gopienl. A tole oF fate would have ie
a [ore ep eqreyenniah amber ty
: wh lich, by the way ay was scrapped at mid-

point, vay to pause, contemplation
ion toa world beyond what ees
lar not unmindf tha soe of you

ind staggered by the wir of police

- brutality. You have been the vewtans
creative suffering. Continue to work with

the faith that unearned suffering is

~ Go back to Mississippi, go back to
Georgia, go back to

Alabama, go back to
Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos

of our northern cities, knowing that "

i)
dream
have a dream that one day this

nation will rise up and live ous the true
meaning of its creed: oWe hold these truths .
to be sef ;

oThe hab nar cet
equal... ? (The Autobiography of Martin
Cather Kg Warns Ree NY

His was a self-proclaimed style of "

Social Gospel advocacy, defined as a
liberal movement that attempted to
apply Biblical teachings to problems

associated with industrialization or .

changes in ?,?, transportation, and
other aspects of society (The Interpreter Ts
One-Volume Commentary on the Bible,
1984 Parthenon Press, Nashville, TN).

Martin was also a student of the
teachings of Walter Rauchenbush, whose
Philosophy focused on social progress and

-cott, led by Dr. King " that launched
the modern civil rights movement. Afri-

can Americans made up 70 percerit of -

the passengers in Montgomery, and the
tion that the local merchants were eco-
nomically dependent on Black riders.
oThe oppressed have power. ? That was
the ironic revelation on which the entire
civil rights movement was based. All great
social movements " movements that

convert dissenting opinion into leverage,

=, Movements that becotne aforcein history

nication of feconane. on ma 7
t was during the Montgomery bus
boycott, spontaneous in origin, that Dr.
i whipConkrae decane
Lea chip Cooks docioct.
tipnaaier fair rest aoe
sca re 2 King dese db
tics : t
to Gandhi his ic revelations
lied ethics and social move-
ments. He raises the questions that all
movements address: Do strikes and boy-
cotts work? Are they fair? Are the hard-
ships worth the pains? Whereis the o
pressor vulnerable? And where does the
tential power of the oppressed reside?
King gveran inane oWe woud
use this boycott method to give birth to
justice and freedom... . I came to see that
what we were really doing was withdraw-
i our cooperation from an evil system,
than merely withdrawing our sup-

pany, being an external expression of the

system, would naturally suffer, but the
basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with

havemaponded thscry ye Ute
to this cry ni
States and others for help. Many have
responded. The United States - in spite
of its being criticized for being stingy -
as were other rich countries, provided
most of the food, clothing, shelter, fresh
water and money needed to prevent
further death and provide relief from
the maladies that occurred as a conse-
quence of the tsunamis that came about
as a result of an earthquake.
Tsunamis are something relatively
new for this country. We have not ex-
fifty years, and
occurred in Alaska, where the death
toll was so low in comparison that our
istori was Wecan
count now: we have already given you
the numbers as we see them, and they
are frightening,

2B!
rooted in the American dream.

Disaster:

gs

the essential goodness of man; such

- thinking later became the blue print-

more or less- for Roosevelt Ts New Deal

Policy- whereby social programs were set
forth to assist the poor into economic

rom the philosophical pen of
Plato, Locke, Hobbes, tothe Sociological
brilliance of Karl Marx, the Western
especial te sy of Ghani paste
the stu Ts passive
resistance/non-violent philosophies,
ing was an enormous figure who dared

ink outside the box.
Fearlessness of the unknown
allowed Martin's genius to explore and

evil. We were simply saying to the white
community: We can no longer lend our
cooperation to an evil system. From that
moment on I conceived of our movement
as an act of massive ion. ?
King always recognized the signifi-
cance of spontaneous actions, but he also
realized 1 without organization and
range strategy, spontaneous ene
boycotts played a major role throughout
all phases of the civil ri

its movement.

On February. 1st 1960, four Black
oco! eS er down at a whites-

only lunch counter at Woolworths in
Greensboro, North Carolina. The sit-in
movement was born. Supported by Dr.
King, SNCC (the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee) called for a
boycott of Woolworths, oa nation-wide
campaign of selective buying. ? Pickets
went out the country.
White students Saleh were
r to rt ts move-
ment, The hational boycott provided a
vehicle for their pent-up energy and cre-
ativity. They put up posters, set up pick-
ets, devised new chants, sang songs in front
of stores, and turned shoppers into activ-
ists for civil rights. Some of the students
who participated in the boycott later be-
came founders of Students for a Demo-
cratic Society, a massive nation-wide stu-
dent organization committed to partici-
patory ; :
Students are more easily aroused and
energized by direct action than by elec-
toral campaigns for pre-selected candi-
dates. The vitality of the civil rights move-
ment was due in part to its independence

You will recall that fewer than
2,000 Americans have been killed in
the war now going on in Iraq and.Af-
ghanistan (plus ten times as many na-
tionals of those countries), although we

reinterpret one-eyed views of

s Tea

¢

fundamentalist teaching. Riverside
Webster Ts II Dictionary defines
fundamentalism as the belief that

religious o political doctrine should be

ented literally, not interpreted or -

imp!
adapted. For Martin was convinced that,

ay religion profeing concen forte seule

of men and is not equally concerned about
the slums that damn the economic
conditions that strangle them and the social
conditions that cripple them is a spiritually
to be buried. ? (The Autobiography of
Marinate Kg, Warne Boos Ni
1998) -

Ours is his rich with meaning,
moral and ethical applications for good
living and unending

chings On Strat

from the confines and self-censorship of
electoral politics. Under the leadership of
Dr. King, the civil rights movement kept
the initiative and put the supporters of
the status quo on the defensive. The boy-

Becar 2 ecw Re ae
insane a

. . rare iets % eR oo Sga 8
9 lil Rocorcneere

that the United States and other (rich)
countries such as Germany, Italy, En-
gland, France and Australia were being
called stingy by the rest of the world, it
was clear th the United States alone

oa get ra van ies had contributed
ures Irom their | 4 QUESTION WAS POSED As To | ?"?°re in goods an
overnments. Ten services than all of
es as many |WHETHER THIS KIND OF DISAS-} ¢he5¢ countries
would be a fair TER CAN OCCUR ON THE combined. Yet,
guess. Bur even at_| SHORES OF NortH AMERICA? Henies chine
t, the to ANSWER were to
is only 20,000. And Le = TEs. bring water, medi-
the tolfof death attributed to the tsu- cine and food to the broadest reaches of
namis will surely be 200,000, 300,000 these seven countries on two continents.
or more, It has been estimated that there were
Fortunately for us, we can see the "_at least 200,000 Europeans on the sub-
devastation due to the miracle continents when the earthquake struck,
of television that began tocomeinim- and their own counties are working val-
mediately after the first tsunami hit the _iantly to see to it that they, or their bodies,
day after Christmas. In spite of the fact are recovered in a timely fashion.

ng progress no hatter

ee DCTS . Blac be

the mountains we must climb. Martin
Percpen, nou aed age
you, és the key to alll thi:
Ours is his legacy that implores us to search
for the truth and to choose analysis over
paralysis in all situations no matter the
reactionary forum in which it rises.

It's been along 40 years, but look
at what progress we've made. To that
Dick Gregory, who graced ECU
Murphy's center Monday on January 10,
2005 in Celebration of King, adds ono
other group of people on the face of this earth
have come as far in as many years-what
gains, what strides. Be proud! Martin is
seem hw pnp wlio ake
years |
him...and what he did for the world. ?
On that note, now that we're out

cots enabled millions of supporters to par-
ticipate in the movement on a weekly and
daily basis For King, the calendar of jus-
tice was not determined by the dates of
Presidential and Congressional elections.

See ML Te ek

A questign was posed as to whether
this kind of disaster can occur on the
shores of North America? The answer is
yes. Itis only a matter of time'when such
a disaster does occur, but American scien-
tists have put in place the kinds of warn-
ing signals that will eliminate the kind of
massive death and ion that we see
going on now in Southeast Asia.

As days go on and we see more and
more death, more and more destruc-
tion, we will probably begin to realize
how futile it is for us to go to war with
one another, There are enough natural
disasters for the world to get along.
There are enough disasters to fulfill any
appetite that mankind may have for
such atrocity. Where must we go, as a
civilization, from here? We certainly
must figure out what scientists from
over the rest of the world ponder: how

Because whatever happens to Ameri

America first..

of the wilderness let Ts not party to revel,
but plan a party to ensure that we:
our spirit of endurance and survi

ae
3


-

oe

ote.

to the masses. And for those who ask the.:

question: They still here? Our litele*

survivalist can respond resoundingly,
YES- we still be in house that us folks bui
Hollar! .

Yours in the struggle,

Susie Clemons

ERRATTA: December 15, 2004:
edition of M-Voice newspaper. The T

statistics on HIV/Aides for black women

i

and girls, _5 paragraph, should have read:. « .

oBlack women are diagnosed with 72% of

all new HIV/Aids cases among women, and
Black girls 76% of all teenage teens. ? .

Essence Magazine, December 2004,
volume 35, number 8. |

Civil rights leaders chose their own battle?
fields according to their own needs and:
strengths, and they set the deadlines for
their adversaries. King did not wait to see
Continues on Page 5

an effective and early warning system

egy Tactics

This Could Happen Here :

can be devised, and whether there is _

any technical knowledge that we might
gather in order to combat that which

appears to be unchallengeable-anatu-

ral disaster without any form of relief.
Even as we sit and ponder, there is

nothing that can be offered to those _

who suffer except death and luck. That

is not a very friendly kind of persua- |

sion. Let us close out where we are now
with prayers for the living and prayers
for the dead resulting from this freak of
nature, and hope for those who survive
that man can, in his wisdom, create
something to counteract such maladies
- of, ifnothing else works, an assurance
that prayer is the only answer.

ilbert A. Tatum is Publisher
Emeritus & Chairman of the Board of
the Amsterdam News

oint Man
Continued from Page 2
drug bill passed in 2003 does more,
all by itself, to increase the long-run
budget deficit than the projected rise
in Social Security expenses, ? The pre-
scription drug bill is a massive transfer
of public funds to the pharmaceutical
industry, without lowering prices for
American consumers, the igh
in the world - the job Republicans were
put in office to perform.

Along with the fake Social Secu-
rity crisis comes fake Black ae
in the person of Harold Ford,
vouched for by People magazine as
one of the o50 most beauti ple
in the world, ? Ford, the enter, ex-

of bamboozlement, and armed
with a total immunity to facts, is so
dense that he believes his relative
youth trumps reason and data. oI Tm

33 years o many in m
tion will tell you they're not expect-

_ ing to be able to rely on Social Secu-

rity, ? Ford told the April meeting of
anti-Social Security mercenaries, He
was simply repeating a Bush line that is
not rooted in reality, but endlessly ech-
oed in corporate media. The Bush plan
is, however, a self-fulfilling prophecy,
designed to destroy both the political
premise and financial basis of Social Se-
curity in the United States.
ts of young Black people are
not as dumb or duplicitous as Harold
Ford. Dr, Maya Rockeymoore, a vice
sopnaay of the Congressional Black
aucus Foundation who is roughly
Ford Ts age, notes that the 20 cents on
the dollar ogap ? in Social Security in-
puts conservatively projected for the
2052 isa statistical blip on the
fall concury screen. oWhat privatizers
don't want Americans to know is that
this 20 cent gap per dollar of prom-
ised benefits is manageable and can
be closed without radically altering

the system, ? wrote Rockeymoore, in
the December 16, 2004 issue of The
Black Commentator. oIn fact, the tax
cuts President Bush gave away to the
wealthiest one percent of Americans
could have covered the amount of the
long-term Social Security shortfall and
there would have still been money left
over for other important priorities. ?
Rep. Ford Ts dialogue with sworn
enemies of Social Security has led him
to devise schemes to otarget benefit
levels to those who actually work
longer ? - a dagger in the heart of Black
Americans, who are forced to work
under less reliable terms of employ-
ment and with less compensation than
whites. Thus, Ford would exacerbate
the institational racist bias against
Black workers a population about
which he appears to know nothing.
But Dr. Rockeymoore, does:
oBecause of historical patterns of
discrimination in the U.S. education

system and labor market, African
Americans are more likely to earn a
modest living during the course of
their working lives, more likely to have
experienced spells of unemployment
or underemployment, and more likely
to retire with less income from private
pensions, assets or personal savings. ?
The Bush administration's assault
on the last bastion of the American
social safety net can be repulsed, but
only if we reject the Trojan Horses who
have been positioned in Black ranks -
most Sau , Harold Ford. The de-
plorable state of Black media has set
charlatans like Ford free to trot around
the country, forging alliances with
Republicans and Dixiecrats at will.
Ford was among the oFour Eunuchs ?
of the ee Black Caucus who
endorsed George Bush's Iraq War pow-
ers, in October 2002. He was re-elected
the next month, and two years after
that, as were the three other eunuchs.

There seems to be no account-
ability in Black politics, no incisive

coverage of political figures on Black

radio and effective print media (for-
get television), and no reliable cam-

paign contributions except from the |

corporate sector and stingy labor
unions. In this environment, media
caricatures like Harold Ford thrive.
The virus spreads, undermining the
Black Political Consensus that never-
theless propels 90 percent of us in the

same direction, every presidential elec-
tion,

But we fail to exercise due dili-

gence on the home front, in our own

istricts. That's why Harold Ford ex.

ists, asa.
article finds its wa

where it can do the most good,

Harold Ford .
didereat styles himself as the can

greed an ambition are ag old as dirt.
|

litical figure, We hope this T
into as many T
Memphis households as possible,

- However, we know that

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prt ora * %: | . tolive

E E (BE) an-
its list ofthe 75 Most Poser

America, as featured inthe Febreny

ver story. The list, which in-
cludes 18 CEOs (15 men and three
women), was, culled from the 1,000 larg-

_ est domestic and international corpora-

tions traded publi rt S. equi
ties masieee inchide re
sentatives from a tor of62.cn rm

tod Paden Ri Paces Sorc eign, pepper mentand ts unqualified
Nim, resident Aristid's administration, the ight signal, whatever that signal hap the Bush administration repeatedly de. MU6®-Itis allied with the puppe
Fanmi Lavalas politcal pary, are under- So, what about Haiti? The violence "leadership of President Aristide is now Sow bythe Benallan tlary
ground or in exile. Unemployment is is certainly not on the scale that is taking os entirely or considered o4 70 2 that be aceomnben ie:
going through the roof. So, one may ask, Plat in Iraq, but more importantly, the either 4 ignored bleshort ofa UN trusteeship. ,, Jeo, snore den leit tesigtaene (
why mot just put the whole thing off robin olen byooroont aig anetatons ae taking place in Peritg the ey for new elections, Un
Asyoumayhavenoted, the thegortaee ae te Haid cot epdic bon ake erie Bt ely, asistance from the USA,
word: Iraq. As you may have noted, the the government, otherwise known asal- Haiti on a regular . Ure be RAC esi oauk selby
Bush administration hasbeen willing Finck the USA Thus iedoes nottake an tum of elected President Anstide. If with the possible exception of sonte fi.
push forward with an election in aq Eins in to understand that should the the many oust: of Haiti then free 222i! assistance co an Bow dies
despite the fact that there is full-scale Bush administration truly wish to end Seat aan edi of Fiat cen fee ceng ec any
illa war underway, along with the the killings in Haiti . the Sective resins of establishine an answer vtaken against che Aria 1 project
activities of terrorists. There is no stabil- sundwork for elections, that it could In order for es tabishing, place, the under by ake USA take, ide admin
ity, yet the Bush administration and this with a bit of pressure on both the fem ble ee bean uding on of
fisenh chised BI des ahver an initi Jat- 92 hed y under the guise of US involvemen Ca source of concer , m. The
eB oe a ) tempt was brutally turned back on Bghebsea a anerhe gus of same can be said for France which p
' the AE Legacy OF MLK. slots Sunday onthe Edmund tecs world of America making, Fifty peroent nothing short ofa despicable ole in the
) te Bridge. Gathering up his disciples and of the Black men in New York City are overthrow of Aristide, There are, how.
ry gleg| eet ern apartheid and regained our sense of devotees of the movement, with the eyes unemiployed. The numbers in other ur- ever, countries in res fear of
als as articulated in the D ion of dignity as a people " because we stood, of the world watching, the second at- ban centers are not at the same level, but American States and srnciee inion,
Independence and the Constitution. made demands and backed them with tempt succeeded. Out of this momen- are still di high. Inferior educa- along, perhaps with the Nordic coun-
~ Coupli the uilosophy of the Hindu : tous triumph of the was . pawne tion is the order of the day in America Ts tries, that might be willing and able to
2 pee led cial justice activist, April 4, 1967, they killed th the historic Voting tsActof 1965. odark ghettos, ? a fact that inevitably assist in the transition back to democ-
Mahatma Ghandi, with the tenets of with the intent of destroyi But the meaning of that moment has means thata disproportionate number racy. iti
the social gospel of Christianity King the dream and the movement that ha been tarnished by the fact that forty years of young Black men will end up popu- We have to stop permitting our lead-
galvanised oe of oe ignificant transformed America. since King Ts later we have experien yet another lating America T jails and prisons. In the ers to speak with forked tongue. There is
social movements in the history of this tragic and untimely death, the power election where Black voters were disen- face of these stark realities, nowhere do nothing special about Iraq that permits
Country, a movement that eventually in- elite of this nation has to ren- franchised in Ohio and other states. we hear plans for a odomestic Marshall it to have elections in a time of war "
ired oppressed people in virtually ev- der the dream impotent and passé by Two years from now the Voti plan ? to rebuild the urban ghettos and leaving aside the entire question of the
=e quarter of the world to believe that smothering it in meaningless celebration, Rights Act will come up for renewal and rescue the shattered lives of millions of leptimacy of their proposed elections "
owe shall overcome. ? ritual, pomp and circumstance. The is no certainty that the Con people for whom King Ts dream is a mi- e Haiti remains under a cloud. There
| But King Ts triumphs did not flow. National Holiday, though educational under the sway of conservatives, will are some disturbing racial overtones to
from merely postulating and ing andi tive, treats King Tsdreamas be in a to extend it. Moreover, Therefore, ceremonies, celebra- the notion that Haiti is an eternal basket
ideas about social justice and social if it is a fait accompli, as if | struggle election 2004 exposed once again that tion and rituals can be no substitute _ case that can only be improved by being
inge. In the spirit of Frederick for social justice and social change for there is an urgent need for election re-_ for the kind of righteous work that caged as aUN protectorate. The basket
s, his triumphs were the result Africans in America and other form to take private money out of poli- King did while he walked among us. _ in which Haiti is encased is one that was
of serious $ Douglass taught that people is finished. Hence, the. oliday _ticsand make it easier for peo toper- We must keep King Ts spirit alive in woven by the USA and France avery =
opower concede nothing without ade- is generally devoid of the kinds of ac- manently register and vote. isalso words and deeds, mar ing, picket- long time ago. It is time for Haiti to re-
mand, it never has and it never will. Find tions that reflect King Ts determination aneed to open up the to provide ing, demonstrating, voting, engaging gain ts sovereignty and be permitted to
out just what a will submit to to continue the struggle until America greater access to third parties ar/d inde- _ in civil disobedi ing tocoura- follow its own Pa -
and you have the exact amount has indeed lived up to its promise to pendent candidates. As we commemo- geously fight for social justice and so- Bill Fletcher Jr. is president of
__ Of injustice and wrong that will be im- ensure olife, liberty and happiness ? for ~ tate the 40th Anniversary of the Selma cial until we can truly proclaim "_TransAfrica Forum, a W: n, D.C.-
Afti- posed them... ? King understood _ all her sons and daughters. The spirit of to Montgomery March this year; it is clear that all of God Ts children are ofree at based non-profit educational and orga-
this and hence his was King no lohger lives in the celebrations that we must keep King Ts spirit alive. last. ? This is the lesson to be learned nizing center formed to raise awareness
to inspiring the toriseup, that adorn America in his name. However, protecting the right to m reflecting on the life of Rev. Dr__ in the United States about issues facing
non-violently, to and overcome There is much work to be done to vote is not the only issue on the unfin- Martin Luther King, Jr., our Black the nations and peoples of Africa, the
the injustices and wrongs that had been make America and the world ae ished civil rights/human rights agenda. Saint! Caribbean and Latin America. He also is
heaped uponi them. The sons and daugh- ised land ? Kin envisioned. 19 5 wit- ere is a war in that is thwarting Ron Daniels isan internationally co-chair of the anti-war coalition, United
ters of former enslaved Africans rose up _nessed one of the greatest triumphs in the process on oswords into recognized human rights activist and for Peace and Justice
to confront, challenge and overcome the the ministry of Martin Luther King. He ploughshares ? to meet the human newt, Executive Director of the New York City (www.unitedforpeace.org). He can be
sons and daughters of former slave mas- was called to Selma to lead a march to or Poof al working people inthis coun- based Center for Constitutional Rights reached at
ters. We shattered the shackles of south- Montgomery to demand voter rightsfor _try.and the world. Jur civil liberties are T (CCR) bfletcher@transafricaforum.org.
is Anowunt it of 75 Nat Pera iia Americans in Corporate Amerie |
? John W. Thompson, Chairman _willl continue to grow. I think it Ts ex- _to take tage of the opportunities DEBT PROBLEMS?
2000 and CEO, Symantec Corp. tremely positive that we have a num- oThe corporate leaders on our inau- FOR FREE LEGAL CONSULTATION On
Lloyd soe pas ya vet of. Ain American EOS presi- gun Int oftap ee annages seas. .
resident, GE Consumer and In- ents, and chief operating officers o manv of the ex- i Mine
dustrial and major Scum as effective role "_ecutives on our 2005 list were | CHAPTER ] OR B BANKRUPTCY
R.L. oBob ? Wood, Chairman, models, ? says Ronald A. Williams, tomatch "and exceed. We are i CALL: .
CEO, and President, Crompton resident of the S17:9 billion Aetna that today T black corporate elite will do . Jerome
Corp. Ine oAnd it helps organizations focus the same future generations of African . : 4
Ten companies have multiple ex- on becoming more of [meritocracy], American co rate achievers, ? says & Attorn And Counselor t Law
ecutives on the list. General Electric " where cople can be judged on the Graves. The criteria and com- _ ey a ; j
. the parent sthe basis of the value they create and not prehensive profiles of the 75 Most Pow- I. pO a ne eee
way with four, followed by Xeroi With dn the basis of their race or ethnicity. ? "_ erful African Americans in Corporate i iz 125, Pitts sp A RRR ALF all
three. Ei t companies haveTWO ex- Paula Madison, president and gen- _ Americais available in the Feb laryissue | . a ESS EON ET :
ecutives on the list: Duke ,Panig eral manager of Los Angeles-based of BLACK on Ofc: (250)75)-9951
Mae, FedEx Express Corp., Ford Mo- KNBC a] regional manager for two _ newsstands January 18th. _
tor Co., Genera! Mills, McDonald Ts Telemundo stations, sums up her phi-
USA, Starwood Hotels & Resorts World- losophy of the. advancement of blacks,
wide Inc., and Wachovia. particularly women, simply: oThe im-
In a corporate environment that is portant thing is to continue getting us
often inhospitable to black profession- mo the pipeline and have us positioned

oand absolutely there is no doubt there
wings Fenn : Ir: wing
al . It's;
we happen In 1988 BE -
By 1993, there were 12 presidents and
two CEOs among the 40 African Ameri-
cans included in the top tier: Richard
D. Parsons, the then-CEO of Dime
Savmgs Bank of New York, and Clifton

_R.Wharton, Jr. CEO of TIAA-CREF

When BE selected the Top 50 Blacks in
Corporate America in 2000, the num-
ber of CEOs had to six. This year,
the number of Afecan American

rose to 18 "a 300% increase Franklin

Has progress been made? oWell yes
and no, ? says BE Founder and Pub-
lisher Earl G. Graves St. oWhile it is true
that the corporate elite identified in our
2005 list represent a 300% increase over
our 1988 list, it is also true that African
Americans still hold less than 12 of the
tens of of senior-level, cor-

at America Ts 1,000

Arthur Harper, CEO
and President, GE Equipment
Services

Carl Horton, CEO and Presi-
eal Absolut Spirit Com-
yf Lewis, President and
cm

Renetta McCann, CEO,
Starcorn Amencas

E, Stanley O TNeal, Chairman,
CEO, and President, Mernil
Lynch & Co.

t., CEO,
Packer,

als, these top executives say the number
of blacks who reside in corner offices

so that as more executive positions be-
come available, we're poised and ready

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3

Mrs. Beatrice Maye
A World Without
Fathers
To The Editor -

A recent NEWSWEEK carried the
face of a black boy about seven and the
headline oA World Without Fathers, ?
More than half of our black males are
raised without fathers. A large per-ent-
age of these males become a risk in ado-
lescence. More and more white males
are being raised similarly, without fa-
thers and thus at risk of undisciplined
behavior, unclear responsibilities, anti-

- Social behavior, and an inability to at-
tach completely to adult women, thus
continuing the cycle of divotce.

oFour of every ten children in
America will go to bed tonight in a heme
where their father doesn't live. Sixty per-
cent of rapists, seventy-two percent of

4

adolescents murderers and seventy per-

_ cent of all long-term prison inmates are

boys who grew up without their fathers
in the home. ?
Crime statistics are only avery dra-

| Matic way of pointing out the common

sense idea that if dad's not around, the
son has a greater chance of acting out

- against society. Therefore, the father a

boy needs.

WHAT WE MUST DO:

A MANIFESTO FOR CHANGE
WHAT WE MUST TEACH OUR
BOYS:

We must teach our boys to appre-
ciate their African heritage. We must dis-

| ply before them our heroes, to let them

ow that many people have paved the
way for our blessing and success.

We must tell our boys how to speak

to people, look people in the eye, hold
their heads high, and believe in their
hearts that they are somebody. People
who are confident make . People
who are confident are the most likely to
succeed.
We must remind our boys that they
are loved and lovable. And we must start
by teaching our boys that, too. A loved
child can face anything. A loved child
is better able to accept God Ts love, be-
cause he has experi- enced the beauty of
the parent-child relationship.

We must teach our boys that real
men dont just produce children "they/
other them.

TEACHING OUR MEN, REACHING
OUR FATHERS WHAT WE MUST
TEACH OUR MEN

We must demonstrate to our men

SCLC Holds Give-away at their new

headquatrters over the Holiday "

Shown at their new SCLC Headquarters on the corner pf 14th Street and Flemi

State President SC

» Bennie Roundtree,

Community College

St: From left to right, Brother Bru, County Commissioner Melvin McLawhorn,
and SCLC recipient, Commissioner Dave
Hammond and William Clark of WOOW Radio/M-Voice News

| salutes

Matin Luther King, Jr.
In honor of

Black History Month

Celebrate with us and
oTREASURE YOUR History ?
duking the month or
February 2005.

os
Gods

_ barrier to their sone emotional, spinal

le that cheating, stealing, and
of their wives or children is not
5 Way. .

We must teach our fathers that they
will never help their sons be-come men
unless they first become men. We must
stress to them that their own failure to
take responsibility will be the biggest

evelop-

psychological, and sociological
ment. .
We must teach our men what a real

* a priest "one who leads the spiri-
tual development of a family,

®a eee who is able to pro-
vide Er of a households basic needs,

* a protector "one who knows how
to keep bad influences, people, and cir-
cumstances away, and

* a lover (for husbands only) "one
who loves his wife as his own flesh, and
remains faithful to her in mind and spirit
as well as in the body.

We must teach our men that the
failures of their own fathers does not

January 15 - 31,2004 The Minority Voice Newspaper

mean that they are destined to fail their
sons. We must not use our own dismal
past as an excuse. At some point, we have
to break these See pee
can't it be you?

We must teach our men that real

men respect and cherish all women as
special.
We must teach our men that real
men call their wives if they're run-ning
late, and have no problem telling them
why. They come home at a decent hour
because they respect their wives and chil-
dren. We must re-verse this macho psy-
chology that oshe doesn't need to know "
I'll get there when I get there. ?

We must teach our men that real
ment never, never lift a hand to any
woman.

We must teach that real men do
not just talk to their parents (the obliga-
tory once a week phone call); they take
care of their aging parents and make sure
they live lives of quality until God calls
them home. .

We must teach our men that real

Pitt County NAACP Obtains

Over the past two years the Pitt
County NAACP has been at the fore-
front of controversy surrqunding its
advocacy in high profile cases such as
the police custody death of 41 year old
Eugene Allen Boseman, and the death
of 23 year old Kenneth Grey Suggs, Jr.
Each year hundreds of Greenville, and
Pitt County, residents complain to the
NAACP that their civil rights have been
violated. The NAACP takes the com-
plaint, conducts its investigation, and
determines what action it should take.

Local President, Calvin Henderson,
said, othe NAACP is being overwhelmed
by residents complaining of civil rights
violations. We have sought out help to
screen cases so that we can focus our at-
tention on cases that truly involve Con-
stitutional and Civil Rights violations. ?
According to Mr. Henderson, he has

sought the help and support of Attor- -

ney Demyra R. McDonald. Henderson
said, oMiss McDonald has agreed to serve
on our Redress Committee and as
our local Counsel. ? He added that hav-
ing the availability of a local Attorney
will help us to become more effective in
serving the needs of Greenville and Pitt
County residents, and will give us an
eye of expertise to assist us in the case
Screening process.

Attorney McDonald obtained her
Juris Doctor Degree from the Thurgood
Marshal School of Law, Texas Southern
University, a historically black college, in
1995. McDonald was admitted to the
North Carolina Bar in 1996. She was
born in New York and grew up in

_ Kinston, North Carolina from age 5 years

old. She has an identical twin sister who

ois also a licensed attorney in the State of
North Caroliriai McDonald's mother is
o the Vice President of Nursing at Lenoir

Memorial Hospital.

Attorney McDonald has a history
of civil rights advocacy from an early age.
McDonald served as President of the
NAACP Youth Chapter while in junior
high school in Kinston. After graduat-
ing from Kinston High School in 1987
McDonald attended Hampton Univer-
sity. She graduated Hampton in 1991
with a Bachelors Degree in Political Sci-
ence. McDonald also holds an Associ-
ates Degree in Broadcast Technology from
Lenior Community College. McDonald

also holds an interest in Black History
and served on the African Holocaust
Memorial Committee in Greenville,
North Carolina in 1991 that resulted in
the historic event of an American city
government acknowledging: the African
Holocaust.

After law school, McDonald prac-
ticed law in Kinston for approximately
3 years and in July of 1999 began to
practice in Greenville in a local law firm.
Her practice has included Criminal De-
fense, Traffic, Personal Injury, and Medi-
cal Malpractice.

In January of 2004 she opened
McDonald Law Offices, PC., located
on the Northwest comer of 10th and
Evans Streets in Greenville. McDonald
Law Offices, P.-C. presently focuses on
Criminal Defense, Traffic, Personal In-
jury, and is expanding into the areas of
Business and Civil Rights. Her practice
currently serves Pitt, Greene, and Beau-
fort Counties. McDonald Law Offices,
PC. also works with a network of attor-
neys in other counties.

McDonald has served as a volun-
teer in the local community by present-
ing a Community Law Forums for low-
income families and local residents to
educate them about the law and to serve
as a role model for youth. McDonald
said, oI feel a great responsibility to give
back to the community and help others.
I have been blessed in my life. I do not
take the opportunities I had to get an
education and gain professional experi-
ence for granted. I feel a responsibility to
help the community and improve the
lives of all people. ?

NAACP President Henderson said
that, oAttorney Demyra McDonald is a

shining example and role model for our:
young people. She is both an excellent.

attorney and businesswoman. She is an
asset to this community. Her willingness
to volunteer with the NAACP speaks to
her concern for others in this commu-
nity. ?

McDonald said that she has sup-
ported the goals of the NAACP since
junior high school ad added that, oAt a
time when, once again, Americans of all
races are giving their lives to fight for our
liberty and freedom it is imperative that
we protect our Constitutional and Civil
Rights at home. It is unfortunate that in

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men guard their tongues. James 3:6-8
says that the tongue, while a olittle mem-
ber. ? has the power to bless and to curse
and can set on course the fires of hell if
unbridled. That give us reason to be so-
ber about what we say.

We must teach our men that real
men move from lust 2 ee, from
oshacking ? to building a relationship that
he can present before the very face of
God without shame or embarrassment.

We must teach our men that real
men seek to own rather than rent, to
save rather than spend, to give rather
than take. We must work to- ward the
elimination of debt. The borrower serves
the lender; an over-load of debt can even
hinder your ability to serve God, your
family, and your community.
WHAT WE MUST TELL OUR BOYS,
OUR MEN AND OUR FATHERS

We must tell our boys, our men,
and our fathers how special they are ev-
ery day. They won't get that anywhere
if they don Tt get it at home.

Atty Demyra R. McDonald
spite of the sacrifices made by people of
I races to assure the freedom of all
Americans there are so many who con-
tinue to suffer the abuse of discrimina-
tion, racial profiling, and other abuses. ?
According to Henderson, some of
the issues that we are concerned about
include minority voting districts and
voting rights violations, racially identifi-
able schools and discrimination against
African American children in obtaining
a sound basic education, discrimination
in recruitment, hiring, and promoting
within City and County Governments,
racial profiling and police abuse of citi-
zens, as well as the treatment of African
American college students on campus.
McDonald said, oI am committed
to working with the Pitt County NAACP

_ pssisting in the evaluation of complaints

made by citizens and providing guid-

ance to the organization for appropriate

redress of grievances. ? Henderson added
that, owe are inundated with complaints
from citizens alleging civil rights viola-
tions.
corpses
partment
Shots By for
Effective immediately Pitt County
Health Department will begin offenng
flu shots to members of the priority
population by appointment only Indi-
vidual who meet the criteria should call
902-2449 for an appointment. Ap-
pointments will be required.
Priority Groups tor Vaccination
include tae following high risk groups:
* All children age 6 - 23 months
* Adults age 65 and over
* Persons 2 64 years of age with
chronic medical conditions including
heart disease, lung disease, diabetes,
chronic kidney disease, suppressed im-
mune system
* All women who are pregnant
during the flu season
* Residents of nursing homes

and long term care facilities
* Children 6 mos - 18 years of

age on chronic aspirin therapy: eo

Additionals members of the
prioirity population includes:
* Individuals age 50-64
* Out-of-home caregivers
and household contacts of
ersons in high risk groups
° Health Care il
ditect patient care {new group

Schools

effective January 3. 2005} ;

Pitt County

Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 17, 2005:

NEXT STOP LAW SCHOOL

Modupe Rouse
NCCU GRADUATE; Pictured
above and all smiles after much hard

work and dedication is Ms. Modupe
Rouse, the daughter of Publisher/

: Broadcaster Jim Rouse of the Minor-

ity Voice/WOOW/WTOW Radio,
posing with her degree in Mass Com-
munications. Ms. Rouse who finished
her bachelor studies Magna Cum |

* Laude, plans to continue her educa-

tion with her sights set on becoming
a lawyer. a

Above Historian John Hope Franklin
and Educator Nell Lewis recently en-
joyed lunch together in Durham, N.C.
during an afternoon of discussions on
Black issues. Mr. Franklin recently cel-
ebrated his 90th birthday this pass Janu-

2nd. .
Conference For Black
Journalists Coming to
ATLANTA, GA - World Journalism
Institute invites professional and stu-
dent journalists to attend the second
annual Spring Conference for African-
American Journalists of Faith at
Morehouse College in Atlanta, April
29-30, 2005. .

Award-winning reporters who
will speak include Gracie Bonds Staples
of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
John W. Fountain (formerly, New York
Times), and Lisa Jones-Townsel from
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The weekend is a unique oppor-
tunity for black journalists who are
Christians to integrate their Christian
faith and journalism practice through
lectures, discussions, and fellowship.

The conference begins Friday,
April 29, with dinner at Paschal Ts Res-
taurant and lecture and discussion
with Anthony Bradley of the Acton
Institute. The closing dinner Saturda
will feature the Samuel Eli Cornish
Memorial Lecture. i ?

Other speakers for the weekend
include Washington, D.C.-based
freelance writer La Shawn Barber,
Lawrence Smith of The Southern Bap-
tist Seminary, and M TRonald-Keith
Tuck of Morehouse College and New
Life International Family Church.
Housing and meals will be com-
plimentary for accepted students.

ooks of interest will also be given to
those attending. The registration fee
is $25. For more information and to
apply online, go to www.worldji.com

World Journalism Institute also
offers multi-week college-level journal-
ism courses during the summer
months in Washington, D.C., New
York City, and Los Angeles. Students
at these summer courses have the op-
portunity to study for three weeks
with outstanding journalists who are
Christians. The most promising stu-
dents are awarded paid internships
with newspapers across the country.

The mission of the World Jour-
nalism Institute is to recruit, equip,
place, and encourage journalists who
are Christians in the mainstream news-
rooms of America. For more informa-
tion, please visit www.worldji.com

Literacy Votunteers
Tutor Training Work-
Training

Literacy Volunteers is recruiting vol-
unteer tutors for its adult Basic Literacy
and English as a Second Language pro-

grams. Volunteers will learn proven teach-

ing strategies at a 12-hour Literacy work-

shop or a 9-hr. English 'as a Second Lan-

guage workshop in February,

of another is not necessary to
an ESL tutor. A rewarding experience
awaits you as you help an adult learn; For
training dates and times contact Literacy
Volunteers at 353.6578 or

sessions are held at the LV-PC
office located at 504-A Dexter St,,
Greenville (near the Beef Barn Restau-
rantand the Emp Security Com-

mission.)

nated African issues to add: s problems
in other pafts of the world. It is an error
that some experts say has direct implica-
cons for global security, which May prove
costly in the global war on terrorism.

Theres one strategy fr how

mel approach wo desing wah FI
AIDS, Fi Aten fon, eet
many policymakers have underestimated

the importance of African curt

oDuring the see! Wat, Abzica was
indeed percerved in security terms, ?
but owhen the Cold War ended a fake
assumption was made [that] Africa no
longer figured into the tension between
the Soviet Union, ? Moose said.

But failure to prioritize African secu-
rity has lead to greater problems for the
world.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide left a
permanent stain on the conscience of the
international community, when close to
one million were killed within one
month, itis in the aftermath of such
destruction that many African countries
struggle with weak institutions and fail-
ing governments.

oThe same conditions that allow al-
Qaeda to develop in stan exist in
Atrica, ? Moose said. oThey present op-

portunities for criminal gangs and terror-

sts like

can embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in
1998, Osama bin Laden was living in
Sudan. Now, im USS. State re
has accused is same government that
provided a training ground for al-Qaeda

(NAPSA)-Warts are tiny skin growths that

havea rough, cauliflower like !

and often grow on hands (common warts)

or on soles of the feet (plantar warts).
Contrary to a widespread belief,

do not

moa n
papillomavirus)-
which frequently

lurks in moist

warm environments. fa

To prevent warts i -
son to person, avoid being bare
lic bathing facilities, locker rooms and
swimming areas. Also, don't share shoes,
socks and towels.

If you do get a wart, there are several
over-the-counter medications available for
self-treatment.

One popular product is Wart Stick(r).
This solid-stick wart remover contains sali-
cylic acid, which is the #1 doctor-recom-
mended ingredient for safe wart removal.
The maximum-strength (40 percent) for-
mula is delivered through an innovative,
wax-based applicator that glides on dry
and odorless. The product has no messy
drips, which can damage healthy tissue.

For more. information, contact
PediFix at 1-800-PediFix (733-4349) or
visit pedifix.com. The product can be pur-
chased from PediFix Ts catalog, in many
drugstores and on amazon.com.

oWhat better place to go than some-
where that is failing? ? said Wynfred Russell,
temporary African Issues
and West African History at the Univer-

sity of Minnesota. oIt Ts an invitation "

these guys are shopping around lookin
for ananbes Afpharbea® hee cad. °

Russell, who was born in Liberia,
added that double standards in western
Policy toward Africa contribute to exist-
ing problems. He poinits to the relative
inaction by U.S. officials to the situation
in Darfur, [Sudan] to represent how the
U.S. responds to a crisis in Africa.

oOn the one hand they say itis geno-
cide, but they haven't done anything, ?
Russell said. oSome of these western coun-
neat economic interests in tars and

is why they are dragging their feet. ?

But hy bs pata dt powers
been ee hesitant when dealing
with African affairs? The answer is a com-
bination of fear, racism and a general lack
nr Aeaisavay

oAfrica is asecond thought on
behalf of western an and
policymakers, ? Russel aid. oThe U.S. es-
pecially, is quick to wash its hands of Af.
. _ This ambivalence toward Africa is
oWe still haventt shaken off all of the racist
attitudes toward Africa, ? said Russell,

oEverything pertaining to Africa goes
that same racist system. ?
om

att,

(NAPSA)-American soldiers wounded
in Iraq and Afghanistan are survivin
what Here once fatal injuries thanks to
high-tech body armor and rapid medi-
care. Recovering from those wounds,
however, can be a long process.

That's why the Department of Vet-
erans Affairs (VA) is working closely with
the Department of Defense (Dol) to
provide the best possible care for
America Ts combat wounded.

Last year, VA authorized free health
care for veterans who served in combat
after Nov. 11, 1998, for any conditions
they feel are related to their service. That
eligibility extends for two years after
separation from the military and includes
National Guard and Reserve members
coming off active duty.

More than half of the U.S. military
personnel wounded in Iraq have been
unable to immediately return to dut y.
Many have separated bom military ser-
vice and are receiving rehabilitation and
specialtycare in VA hospitals,

Combat injuries often result in limb
loss. VA offers prosthetic services at medi
cal facilities across the country. | *hysical
therapists help amputees master the lat-
est prosthetic devices, including com-
puterized legs with programmable
memories and myoelectric arms that re-
spond to the body Ts nerve impulses. Be-
hind the scenes, VA and DoD research-
ers are collaborating on the next genera-
tion of artificial limbs with embedded
microprocessors, composite materials
and neural feedback systems.

Spinal cord injury can change a
veteran's life forever. VA's network of 23
spinal cord injury and disorder centers
links with veterans T hospitals and clinics
throughout the country to provide the
specialized care and support these inju-
ries require.

VAs comprehensive blind rehabili
tation program incorporates multi-dis-
ciplinary visual impairment service

ding racial attitudes.

He added that a lack of interest in
African affairs by African Americans feeds
into the way that Africa is treated.

A poll taken during Liberia T civil con-
flict indicated that 82 percent of Blacks
polled were against U.S. involvement.
oThat was very disappointing, ? Russell
said. oI don't think people are going to
take Africaseriously if the people of Afri-
can descent don't take Africa seriously, ? he
added. .

But even when the U.S. has inter-
vened in African affairs, the results were
not always positive.

The movie oBlackhawk Down, ?

based on the 1993 U.S. intervention in
Somalia, remains a contem symbol
of what is considered U.S. humanitarian
intervention in Africa.

During this conflict, 18 U.S. soldiers
died and two Blackhawk helicopters were
shot down, prompting a removal of troops

by then-U.S. President Clinton.

oEverybody looked at the i
in Somalia and became frightened, T Moose
said. oThat experience caused some seri-
ous hesitation in getting involved in Afri-
can conflicts " that is what conditioned
the slow response to the Rwandan geno-
cide, ? he added.

But Russell is not convinced that the
defeat suffered in Somalia provides reason
enough to disengage with Africa. oIt Ts a
shameless alibi for them to not get involved
in Africa ~ to try and use the situation in

Somalia to not get involved, ? Russell said.

== America Ts Defenders
g War is Just the

teams and blinded rehabilitation out-
patient specialists at VA hospitals with
10 residential blind rehabilitation cen-
ters where blind and low-vision veter-
ans learn how to regain their indepen-

denck.._. na
Tsai the 1991 Gulf Wai; VA per

and D®f) established the Defense and
Veterans Head Injury Program to pro-
vide evaluation, treatment and rehebili-
tation services for veterans who suffer
traumatic brain injuries. The program
includes a brain injury registry and re-
gional clinical network, as well as research
SUPPort.

VA offers counseling for combat
veterans who experience difficulties ad-
justing to civilian life at 206 Vet Cen-
ters located in communities across the
country. These services include confi-
dential sessions with an experienced
counselor and group therapy with other
combat veterans.

For more information on VA ser-
vices tor Iraqi Freedom and Enduring
Freedom veterans, contact the nearest
VA medical center or clinic and ask for
the combat veteran coordinator, or call
toll free 1-877-222-8387 or visit

QUAL

Real Estate

he ie § RENTALS Since 1949]
"Call Steve Johnson lf You Would Lik, To Reat A

1, 2 or 3 Beroom Housing

Unit

ee

hvamanicarian insereacs on could be "___ The way it-which the [Bush] ad- can deliver primary services to their com-
used, ?headded, : pursued this war has been . munities. As it stands now, oonly a frac-
Present conflicts in Sierra Leone, incompetent, headed. Moose does, how- _tioni of it gets to the people who really
Liberia, the Ivory Coast, the Democratic ever, ctedit the Bush _-needit, ?hesaid.
Republic of Congo as well as in Darfur ministrati Yet, the only way for Aftica to face its
threaten forther destabilization in Aft inAftica. oThisad-. current problems is if more advanced
The African Union has attempted ministration was the first to make a com- countries extend commitments that will
to addaew thao peoblenns begets at mitment to the global fund [for AIDS]. If help promote democracy and human
to do so, for lack of resources and support _ ithad not been of that commitment there ts. International policymakers must
has to be recognition that these proble 3 Fifteen million dollars over the course ditions that would ma African coun- %§:
of Ales hfe thems eras exe AIDS treatment and prevention plans in ment, Moosesaid.
a partnership with the U.S. and others, ? Africa and the Caribbean. !What we need _ Failure to do so could create a secu-
oose said. to judge them on is whether they are able ity call that permeates other world
He added that logistical support in. to sustain it and put into place the effec- _ affairs. oIf those countries are not given
transportation and communications _ tive disbursement, he added. the resources to get out of their current
should be provided to the African Union. But implementation of the plan has state of affairs, that chaos and anarchy will
oWe havent made that commitment. Nor drawn its share of critics, oThere is a lot of serve as a breeding ground for terrorist cells
has anyone else, ? he said. } conditionality on the money, ? such asab- and terrorist entities to set up shop,
However, the current approach to the __stinent based sexual education, Russell said. ° Russell said. .
war on terror may prove too difficult _ oMy contacts on the ground tell me that He added, oIf the War on Terrorism
for the U.S. to address otherconflicts the money has been caught up in the is to be won, the war on terrorism needs to
around the world. oOne of the reasons _bureat ? which has made it very dif- ' be taken seriously ? and oif it is a global
that we can't be more robust in what is ficult to reach the intended audience, ? he effort, then Africa should be looked at just
happening in Sudan is that we are added. ae
RATS DEMAND P, standing up to the insurgents. is in place that a large portion of the
ee Se Page I Back om a weeken ttip to Jor- US.and coalition force would leave
army, national guard and police force. _dan, where she met with women run- Iraq within a set period, perhaps 18
So far, the training hasn't achieved the ©, ning for the Iraqi assembly, Rep. Ellen months. oThat could show we aren't

desired results, and the Iraqi forces,
who have suffered heavy losses in ter-
rorist attacks, have a mixed record in

See PUBLISHER - Raggy

honored tradition to much is given,
much is expected T, but a lot of busi-
ness people are about the bottom
line. At the end of the day, it has to
be profitable and whatever it takes
to make that happen they will do. ?

Ritchie is not impressed by that
argument.

' oIt's a shame to see Essence go
because the magazine was really
about quality and maintaining its
role as the defying entity of Ai
can-American culture as far as the
image: of Black women was con-
cerned, ? he says. oIt didn Tt T matter
what your socioeconomic status was,
if you were a Black woman, you paid
attention to Essence. I would much
rather something that plays such a
major cultural role in the African-

merican community be in the
hands of Black people. ?

Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, said she
opposed starting an immediate with-
drawal because of the side effects it
would cause.

oThis is a mess, but it Ts our mess, ?
Tauscher, a member of the House
Armed Services Committee, said of the
situation in Iraq. oI Tm not just for toss-
ing a hot potato on Jan. 30 and leay-
ing town.

oThe last thing we can do is extri-
cate ourselves and leave a failed state in
the region ... that will come back to bite
us in the short, medium and long
term, ? added Tauscher, saying the coun-
try could fall apart in a civil war and

me a haven for anti-U.S. terrorists,

_ Military analyst Michael

O'Hanlon said the Democrats T call for

an immediate withdrawal wouldn't
influence hes a nlnistestion.

complete) withdrawal option

isa loser, ? O Hanlon fret oReali cally

speaking, you'll see a debate over a more

al reductio »

In strategy.
He said such a nuanced strategy
might include a public announce-
ment after the new Iraqi government

really occupiers, ? he said. oWe'll start
to hear more about such options. ?

Cliff May of the Foundation for
the Defense of Democracies said talk
of a withdrawal without completing
the job in Iraq would be dangerous
for U.S. forces and for Americans at
home.

oIt says we're defeated, and we
expect to be defeated. If Anyone ex-
pects this to be our last defeat, they
would be mistaken, ? said May, say-
ing a sudden withdrawal would
embolden the al Qaeda terrorist net-
work and its allies to again attack the
United States.

oIf we don Tt want to fight them
in Iraq, we should decide what is the
proper battlefield, ? he added.

In Baghdad on Saturday, Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.,
said there was no timetable for with-
drawal.

oT Tm not going to speak for the
president of the United States, but
we represent the legislative body, and
there will be no pulling back until
the job is done, ? Frist said.

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907 Dikinson Ave, Greenville, NC (252) 757 -3191

ee ee

The Pitt County Alumnae Chapter of Detea Six;:

The Pep

Proaernts

Is your child between the ages of 6 months and six years?
in his or her future education? Are

in the pageant? If the

ermint Pageant

ntry Orientation.
Place: Room 143 Leslie Building

Pitt Community College
Date: Saturday, January 29, 2005
Time: 11 am-1 pm

There is a Non-Refundable $25 Registrati n
° phone to one of the following ake

252-746-5141 or 252-756-2985
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January 15 - 31, 2005 The Minority Voice Newspaper Page 9 7 : |

Leader's of the New School: America Ts Young Civil Rights Heroes. iscvs:i;iioseinssese

By Monét Cooper,

Many of the surviving leaders of
the 1960s Civil Rights Movement
have turned to careers in public ser-
vice, pursued other professions, re-
tired or become ad hoc activists (asin
Jesse Jackson's case). Now, a new gen-
eration of black young people is ris-
ing to the challenges of our time, shar-

ing a deep comnmitment and desire to .

improve the quality of life in their

neighborhoods, communities and cit-

Following in

Here are 10 youi and-com-
ing black leaders whos chrongh their
vocation and avocation, are positively
impacting the economic, social and
political life of African Americans.
Moya alley |
Moya Bailey, a senior at Spelman
College, is an advocate for eliminat-
ing inequality of any kind, but espe-
cially the discriminatory treatment of
black women: She Ts passionate about
ending the war in Iraq and politics,
especially as it relates to women and

the Steps of Madame CJ

people of color. Last spring, as chair
of Spelman Ts Feminist Majority Lead-
ership Alliance, Bailey spearheaded a
Protest against Nelly Ts oTip Drill ?
video, in which a credit card is swipe
a woman's butt cheeks, when
the rapper came to campus. Bailey is
still working to make syre that people
understand: what the srotest was re-
ally about: connecting struggles, in
this case, the depictions of black
women in the media. Black women
have been talking about representa-

e

tions of themselves for a long time and
it really just brought it to the nation Ts
attention. Money isn't the answer, ?
explains Bailey. oJust because Nelly Ts
getting paid or women are gettin
paid, it Ts not the answer. What kind
of damage is it doing to the commu-
nity? What is it doing to the young
women who are coming after us? ?
Radcliffe Bailey

Artist Radcliffe Bailey calls his art
oa quest to find out who I am. ? Cer-
tainly, Bailey's work is a portrait of his

Walker, Warm Spirit.

Pours $6.5 Million Back Into African American Communities

life as much as that of his ancestors
whose photos he uses as focal points
in his mixed media pieces. The At-
lanta resident plies his trade on build-
ing works of art out of canvas, paint,

hotos and the things he says reflect
life as a black citizen of the world.
Bailey uses the concept of remem-
brance to tell his stories:. An anatomi-
cal drawing of a red heart, the aorta
dripping blood, is his own broken
heart. The steady gaze of a young man,
looking at those who look at the paint-
ing, is the shape of his past. An ances-
tor whose stare he has scanned and
blown up to the size of life. Bailey, an
assistant professor of art at the Uni-
versity of Georgia in Athens, Ga.,

..was writing poems "about striking ~°+

garbage worker and their trucks. To-
day, as a hip-hop laureate, Blackman
uses her rhyme scheme to help others
figure out their place in the world.
She co-founded Free Style Union in
1994, a New York-based nonprofit
that organizes rappers, musicians and
others involved in hip-hop culture to
create work that raises awareness of
different cultures and backgrounds

while inspiring activism. Blackman "

has even gotten the U.S. government

_ into the groove. The U.S. Department

of State appointed her American Cul-
tural Specialist and Hip-Hop ambas-
sador. She is also a 1999 fellow of
Echoing Green, an organization that
guides emerging leaders as they shape

. ; : paints his civil disobedience one their organizations.
EXETER, NH - Nadine Thompson is than 15 years, Madame CJ Walker built lar that is sold is returned back into the supportive hetwork anda product people stroke at a time, telling his autobiog- . Jamal-Harrison Bryant
not only the President, CEO and Co- an empire of neatly 20,000 black women pockets of the consultants, therefore _ love and want more of the first time they raphy with a brush, some paint, ob. In many ways, African-American
Founder of WARM SPIRIT, she isthe _ called Walker Agents, the Walker Manu- wealth and profits are recycled directly try it. Unlike any other black entrepre- jects and a photo. houses of worship were the bedrock
visionary and leader of a community of facturi Co. and the Walker Collegeof back into their communities. neur, Nadine Thompson is creating Toni Blackman ,
over 10,000 women and men who are Hair Culture. In 2004, WARM SPIRIT paid out wealth in our communities and provid- When Toni Blackman was 8 years Continues on P, age 10
empowered entrepreneurs and change Only 6 years ago, in 1999, Thomp- close to $4 million in commission checks ing opportunities for people to live to

son founded WARM 'SPIRIT with her

ents. WARM SPIRIT is transformi
e face of the direct sales and network

friend and entrepreneur Daniel Wolf,

and our top 20 consultants had annual
incomes between $11,000 and

their potential. .
Thompson is. also a wife and

Wachovia Foundation Awards NCCU $1.

marketing industry by providing anop- excited about the possibilities ofa busi- $150,000 through our com ensation mother of two children, Camilla (1] wit usin , Sch larshi
portunity for wealth and financial free- ness venture that incorporated her belief plan. WARM SPIRIT has been extremely and Isaiah (8). She lives in Exeter, ah on for 4 ess/Teacher 0 ps
dom that has not always been accessible in enlightening and empowering successful in creating wealth through its Phillips Exeter Academy with her hus- em . ee
for women and even less so for Aftican- women. Not only does WARM SPIRIT empowering compensation plan. In _ band Rev. Robert H. Thompson. oS Poe
American women. provide access to entrepreneurial oppor- 1999 they paid out $12,000; in 2000, WARM SPIRIT can be found

Its been almost 100 years since Sa- tunities and high quality natural prod- $74,000; in 2001 » $172,000; in 2002, through a nearby consultant, at
rah Breedlove, better known as Madame "_ ucts, most importantly, itcreateswealth $832,000 and in 2003, $2.2 million, www.warmspirit.com or by calling 1-
C] Walker started her hair care Products for the consultants and their communi- To date, WARM SPIRIT has paid out 888-296-9854. For mote information "_
company to become this countrys first . ties. WARM SPIRIT Ts unique market- $6.5 million in commission checks to its about WARM SPIRIT, interviews, prices
self-made Black female millionaireand _ ing planisanem wering entrepreneur- consultants! or products, contact Keesha Abraham at
she did it by pioneering what is now _ ial opportunity t helps create wealth. WARM SPIRIT consultants start 603-772-7508 or 1-888-388-9276 or
recognized as network marketing. In less Approximately 50 cents from each dol- their own business for $99.95 with a keesha@warmspirit.com

Della Reese Offer's Healthy Tips

(NAPSA)-Diabetes is an epidemic in
the United States. abproximately 18

right, regular physical activity and,
when prescribed, taking diabetes

For Managing Type 2 Diabetes

pressure and cholesterol checked on a regu- ¥ i

basis by your health care provider.

million people have diabetes and ap- medication mf, day. ; Recsealso suggests findin asup ee

proximately 90 to 95 percent of those __, Reese has found that education system to help create and implement ac

who are diagnosed have type 2 dia- is the first step to managing diabetes right diabetes management plan. A sup-

betes. Actress and singer Della Reese and encourages those diagnosed with en can include a th care team, :

has type 2 diabetes and is dedicated . the disease to ask their health care pro- ly and friends. ; ee

to educating the public about how Vider for information about every- . __ Idoeverything I can to fight diabe- Chancellor James H. Ammons discusses the $1 million gift with

she manages the disease. thing that could impact their diabe- ts. I eat right, stay active San ae Clayton, Wachovia regional president for the Central North
oWhen I found out I had type 2 tes. Fle personal tips for managing medication every day, ? said Reese Carolina region, and John Messick, Wachovia Durham market

diabetes, I was upset because I keew type 2 diabetes include: oIfyou take an active role in managing resident. From left to right are Messick, Ammons and Clayton

nothing about the condition and I v__ Improve your meal plans; lose your disease, y ou can be stronger than dia- p ?

the extra pounds by reducing calorie betes. I'm living proof!

had nothing to fight it with, ? said
Reese. oSince my diagnosis I learned
that I have the power to make mean-
ingful changes in my life and that my

diabetes management plan prays abig

part in staying happy and healthy. ?
ere is no cure for type 2 dia-
betes and ignoring the condition can
lead to serious diabetes-related com-
lications, such as heart attack, stroke,
blindness amputation, and kidney
failure. While the cause is unknown,

there is hope for the millions of people

intake and eating smaller portions to
help lower blood sugar levels.

U " Ask your health care provid-
ers about finding the right fitness pro-
gram; physical activity is a significant

actor in managing diabetes and
achieving overall good health.

v Talk to your health care pro-
vider about which medication would

who have type 2 diabetes. The condi- be right for you; an oral medication

tion can be managed through eating may

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DURHAM, N.C. "Wachovia Founda-
tion awarded $1 million to North Caro-
lina Central University today to estab-
lish the Wachovia Scholarship Fund in
the schools of business and education
for student scholarship and professional
development.

oWe are grateful to Wachovia for this
award, rich is a major investment in
the future growth and development of
the University, ? said Chancellor James
H, Ammons. oThis scholarship fund will
provide support for academically tal-
ented students and is yet another ex-
ample of Wachovia's ongoing support for
teacher education and business. It is
going to better position NCCU to ad-
dress the critical shortage of teachers in
this state and also enhance our ability to
recruit teaching fellows and other aca-
demically talented students. ?

The Wachovia Scholarship Fund in
the School of Education would receive a
total of $600,000 to suppogt 25 teach-
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sional development and computers for
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ars

oSupporting education is one of our
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Central University has excellent pro-
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,, From 1983-1987 the company con-
tributed $50,000 to the Wachovia Fund
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Page lO - The Minority Voice Newspaper

ee

of the Civil Rights Movement. And
the Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant wants
bene seagylyrd a ice it
7 pastor of Empower-
ment Temple ia Ronn: Bryant has
mobilized ch oers to be mentors
in their neighborhoods and the pris-
a In its first 14 monet; the chuyech
reportedly grown from 43 mem-
bers to 2,300. Fie T in the process of
building an elementary school and
adult learning facility that will open
next fall and focusing his congrega-

tion on building wealth, by givi
them the tools si advice ther 1 need
through wor! and credit semi-

nars. Some would say his message "
part spiritual, part activist "is a nod
to his previous job as the director of
the NAACP Ts Youth and College Di-
vision where he made stopping the
high rate of black-on-black violence
at the top of his agenda. His pop cul-
ture sensibility and love of music (he
is a member of the national board for
the R&B Hall of Fame) pepper his
talks with a message listeners ofall ages
are able to can relate to and under-
stand. °
Jessica Care Moore -
: Never one to relegate her ete:
of writing, acting, publishing and po-
etically prophesying to folks who pre-

ATLANTA, GA - With its unique com-
t * * ofa: . :

fer their rhymes while quaffing cof-
fee in austere galleries, jessica Care
moore has plied her trade of word
play to the tough crowds of Harlem's
_ Apollo and international audiences in
France, Berlin and London to return
tformances on oRussell Simmons T
Bet Poetry Jam ? and with platinum-
selling rapper Nas. The former jour-
nalist made: a name for herself after
winning oIt Ts Showtime At the
Apollo ? five times back-to-back. She
discusses everything from feminism,
and hip-hop culture to humanism
and the lives and souls of black folk.
She's written two original one-woman
shows and launched her own im-
print, moore Black Press, in 1997,
which has published books by her-
self and other writers. In 2003, moore
» Started the Literacy Through Hip
Hop Campaign, which uses rap lyr-
ics as a way to push the importance
of reading and the power of words.
Kendrick Meek
You could say that Kendrick
Meek inherited the family business.
His mother is Carrie P. Meek, a mem-
ber of the U.S. House of Representa-
tives for almost a decade and an elder
stateswoman of Florida politics. Meek
remembers staying up with his
mother, reading bills and other pieces
of legislation into the early hours of
the morning, That's why it Ts no sur-
prise that, in 1994, he was elected to

tors, animators, interactive entertain-

Black Film Fes-

the Florida state congress. Eight
later in 2002, he wo cre os the
U.S House of Representatives, win-
ning the same seat his mother held for
several terms. Now a member of the
U.S. House Armed Services Commit-
tee and the Select Committee on
Homeland Security, he is an avid sup-
porter of Haitian causes, the voting
rights of felons and other issues facing
minorities.

Alisha Thomas Morgan

_ Alisha Thomas Morgan has grown ac-

customed to doing the unbelievable T
In November 2002, Thomas Morgan,
a Democrat, became the first black
elected to the Georgia House of Rep-
resentatives from the prodominare

white Cobb County, a county orth
of Atlanta that was the former stomp-
ing ground of stalwart conservative
politicians like Newt Gingrich and
Bobb Barr. But her election also
marked another milestone, one not
just colored by race, but also by age.
Thomas Morgan became the oung-
est serving member of the Georgia
General Assembly at the age of 24.
Since her term began, she has opposed
a constitutional amendment banning
gay marriage in Georgia, drawing criti-
cism from fellow legislators and con-
stituents. Thomas Morgan has been
able to keep the confidence of her con-
stituents, garnering 64 percent of the
vote to beat a Republican opponent

« _ As part of the IBFF, a think tank

tiative. The daughter of entrepreneurs,

.

re

inald Spei

Martin County Community Action, Inc.
(Serving Beaufort, Martin & Pitt Cou ty)
ht, Exec. Dir.

and T. ment developers, film buyers and dis- ocalled A Cinematic Tsunami T wil bea
2 strong entertainment base, Atlanta _tributors, content providers, game pub- useful session to ide the media towards
stands poised to be the epicenter for this studio executives an others. change. We will provoke change from
collision of art and science. This land- The result is a fertile cuvironment the stereotyped and negative portrayal
mark convergence provide the back- . ere ang ideas and techniques of Black/African people in the media to-
drop for the 500 05 Independent Black that help continue the evolution o the " ward a more positive portrayal of people
Film Festival (IBFF), to beheld March _industry. This goal also is achieved this in the African Diaspora. The mass me-
3-6, 2005, in various venues through- _year thro ¢ strategic partnership dia has a great influence on our behav-
out Atlanta's Buckhead and Midtown _ between I SFF and the Atlanta-based ior and thinking. We need a tsunami-
areas, including the Woodruff Arts Cen- s Austin Foundation, a non-profit ike agenda to ange the landscape of
ter, the High N »and the Georgia organization whose mission is to ingrease the movie industry.
Centers For Advanced Telecommunica- _ participation of urban youth in, and Too often, we hear that the media
tions Tec py (GCATT). Nowin its promote their understanding of, all as- producers are only giving the audience
second year, the IBFF achieved great _pects of the film, music and entertain- what they want. We must change this
initial success in 2004 by bringing to- ment industry by providing the re- motto to say, oResponsible media pro-
gether great minds from technology, sources to support initiatives developed ducers need to give the audience what
music videos, feature films and T by urban rimary/secondary school sys- they need. ? This think tank will formu-
videogames for a week of panel discus- tems and Historically Black Colleges and " ate ways to educate both media pro-
sions, hands-on workshops, cultural Universities. oWe want people of allex- ducers on the importance of providing
events, screenings and socializing, . perience levels across of these iridus- positive and uplifting information ona

__ Loosely modeled after other land- tries to Have the Opportunity to talk with continual basis,
mark festivals such as Sundance & and learn from each other, so we've cre- In the struggle for the hearts and
Toronto, The Independent Black Film ated a forum that should foster creative minds of the lost souls in the Black/Afri-
Festival goes a step further by bringing _ collaboration while allowing ample time can Diaspora, power will need to be ob-
something that Ts lacking in the film, tech- to celebrate the creative thinkers behind tained with a powerful-like tsunami
nology and music industries: the ability these businesses, ? said Asante Addae, _ force. The power to define is the power
for individuals in these cpr sahip creator cee of the IBFE. oWe're to direct minds and conditions that will
hesses to come together in an offici especially pleased to have a partner.in cause aie ences io seraggle.
rum, Attetidees will have the chance to _the Dallas Austin Foundation, which For more information about the
hear, lam ftom, and interact with award- shares our vision for the future of this upcoming event, call (877) 236-6975
winning film and music producers and "_ industry and the possibilities it opens or go online at www.indieblackfilm.org
directors, screenwriters, high-profile ac- up to young people of all backgrounds.
?

who attacked her position on the ga
marriage ban. During her time in of-
fice, she has focused largely on the is-
sues of prison reform for juveniles,
education and healthcare.
Alicia Reece

_In her hometown of Cincinnati,.
Ohio, where turmoil between the
lice and its black residents have fre-
quenced national headlines in the past

ew years, Alicia Reece is as controver- .

sial as she is loved. In November 1999,
Reece, 28 at fhe time, became the
youngest wontan in Cincinnati history
to be elected to an at-large city coun-
cil post. She later became the city Ts
acting vice-mayor and was appointed
vice-mayor in 2003 by Mayor Charlie
Luken after placing second in the Cin-
cinnati City Council elections. In
2002, she helped settle a racial profil-
ing lawsuit filed against the city. The
settlement provided a blueprint to
improve the relationship between law
enforcement and the community, in-
cluding policies on the use of weap-
ons, and a joint $20 million commit-
ment from the city and the Depart-
ment of Justice to fund the new ini-

Reece has also made changes to hel
business owners and has been an ad-
vocate for healthcare, lobbying for
additional funding that kept commu-
nity clinics open for people with little
or no health insurance.
Omar Wasow :
When Omar Wasow clicks his
mouse, everybody listens. It goes with
the territory of being one of the lead-
ing voices in technology and the
Internet. As executive director and
founder of Blackplanet.com, an online
community for African Americans, he
helped to attract more blacks online.
When Oprah needed help as she made
het maiden voyage into cyberspace, she
called Wasow, who guided her in the
12-part series oOprah Goes Online. ?
New York television station NBC-4
and MSNBC tapped him to explain
Internet trends to their viewers. When
he Ts not debunking myths about cut-
ting-edge technology, Wasow remains
vocal in education reform and serves
as a co-chair of The Coalition for In-
dependent Public Charter Schools.
Programming since he was 11 and
online at the age of 12, Wgsow wants

children to have access to the oppor-

?,?

tunities " and technology " he did
ata young age.
B. Michael Young

_ According to the 2000 U.S. Cen-
sus, there were 281.4 million people
living in the United States. Of that
number, 36.4 million of those ople
were African American. B. Mic hae}
Young's greatest concern is for the ones
21 to 40 years old, which totals about
15 million people. As president of the
National Urban League Young Profes-
sionals (NULYP), an auxiliary of the
National Urban League, Young wants
blacks to help themselves by building
wealth, becoming politically active
and aware, improving their health and
rallying together for oracial justice. ?
Young has served on the executive
board of the Washington, D.C.-chap-
ter of the Urban League as treasurer,
vice president and, from 1998 to
2000, two consecutive terms as presi-
dent. Before becoming NULYP Ts
president in September 2003, Young
was a regional vice president for four
consecutive years.
About the Author; Monet Cooper is a
writer living in Atlanta.