Month: November 2022

     Novelist Ernest J. Gaines, whose poor childhood on a small Louisiana plantation inspired stories of Black struggles that grew into universal tales of grace and beauty, will be depicted on a U.S. postage stamp to be issued in January.

     The Leadership Conference Education Fund, in collaboration with the African American Policy Forum, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and other civil rights groups, are rallying outside the U.S. Supreme Court in support of affirmative action.

     Despite demonstrations and calls to resign from officials as high up as President Joe Biden, LA council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo are refusing to leave their seats over their involvement in racist remarks made during a 2021 conversation that leaked earlier this month, per HuffPost.

US Senator Marco Rubio took a drubbing from his Democratic opponent Congresswoman Val Demings during their only debate. Demings chastised the two-term senator for supporting abortions without exceptions and his refusal to support efforts to curb gun violence. “How long will you watch people being gunned down in first grade, fourth grade, high school, college, church, synagogue, grocery store, movie theater, a mall and a nightclub and do nothing?” Demings said. Rubio appeared startled and befuddled at the scolding.

     One definition of recovery is, “a return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength.” Another is, “the action or process of regaining possession or control of something stolen or lost.” I can’t think of any more appropriate descriptions of the first 20 months of President Joe Biden’s Administration. History records President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the creator of the New Deal, President Harry S. Truman as the initiator of the Fair Deal, and President Lyndon Johnson as the mastermind of the Great Society. I believe historians will one day recognize President Joseph R. Biden as the engineer of the Great Recovery.

     Americans are quick to say, “I don’t get involved in politics,” or “I hate politics.” They are the faithful who recite the doctrine as though it were biblical verse. What they fail to realize is that our love-hate relationship with politics is a consequence of day-to-day life in the greatest democracy in the world.

The Walt Disney Company announced a $1 million grant to Florida A&M University’s (FAMU) School of Journalism & Graphic Communication (SJGC), over the next five years, for the establishment of the Disney Storytellers Fund at FAMU.   

     Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, and former president of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury, died Friday (Oct. 28). He was 73. The cause of death was not immediately known.

If pollsters believe African Americans are too overwhelmed, distracted or disinterested to vote in the mid-term and 2024 national elections Nov. 8, they have neither heard nor seen the Arc of Justice 22 city votercade that started in Minneapolis on October 8 and recently finished in a celebration village in Jacksonville, Fla. with the goal of Arc registering 10 million more Black voters.

     Black Americans are disproportionately affected by kidney disease compared to all other races. Diabetes and hypertension are the most common risk factors for developing End Stage Kidney Disease (ESKD), with obesity/overweight being an important co-morbid condition. Compared to their White counterparts, African Americans have a higher prevalence of obesity/overweight 76.3% vs 68.5%, diabetes 18% vs 9.6%, including both physician-diagnosed and undiagnosed disease, and hypertension 43.3% vs 29.1%.