Author: Carma Henry

It’s a month into the college football season but Florida’s two largest HBCUs are playing well. Bethune-Cookman University (4-1, 2-0) and Florida A&M University (4-1, 2-0) currently sit atop the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) standings heading into week 7 (Oct. 10-12) of the college football season.

     Horses Give Hope Education Foundation ended the year on a high note by introducing polo, coding and robotics to our youths. It held its third annual Charity Challenge with celebrity guest Malcolm Borwick, the former Coach of Prince William and Prince Harry.

     A new API advertising campaign highlights the natural gas and oil industry’s leadership in reducing emissions, protecting the environment, making climate progress and serving consumers. While one commercial focuses on the role of industry as problem solvers, a second highlights industry’s ability to solve complex problems.       

     In just over two weeks, there will be an election in Orlando for Mayor of the city. There are two Black candidates, Commissioner Samuel Ings, and Aretha Simons, against the incumbent Mayor Buddy Dyer. Mayor Dyer has been in his position for 16 years, and it appears that he will win again on 11-5-2019.

The parents of Marian Scott, an eight-year old Black girl from Michigan, say she was denied having her school picture taken because she had red braids in her hair. The school, Paragon Charter Academy, has responded saying the third-grader’s hair violated their picture day policy.

     50,000 thousand pencils, 17,000 pairs of scissors, 11,000 bottles of glue and 5,000 reams of paper were just some of the school supplies in 3,000+ boxes distributed recently to Big Brothers Big Sisters partner schools, thanks to the Publix Tools for Back to School program.

Dorothy Newbern, a distraught mother from North Carolina, continues her six-year battle revealing the details of her only child’s cruel 12 plus hour hospital ER visit. Shortly after her 33-year son, Curtis Newbern III, called her complaining of a sudden onset of excruciating head pain (like thunder and lightning going off in his head) and severe blurred vision, his mother immediately rushed him to Novant Health Huntersville Medical Center in Huntersville, N.C. The hospital is also known as AKA Presbyterian Hospital.

When asked further about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)’s reduced efforts to protect students from abusive student loans and student loan services, those most concerned were Blacks, Latinx (73%), consumers earning less than $50,000 per year (72%). Additionally, voters in early Democratic Primary States agreed at 77%, as did both women and military or veterans’ households that polled 70% each. 

I Messenger Media (Texas Metro News/Garland Journal/I Messenger) sat down recently with Judge Tammy Kemp to discuss criticism she has received as a result of her actions following the conclusion of the Amber Guyger murder trial last week.

El-Mekki is answering his own “nation building” call. In May, he announced that after 11 years as Shoemaker’s principal and 26 years of being inside schools as a teacher or administrator, he was devoting his full attention and time to launching a new Center for Black Educator Development to help address the urgent need to bring more Black educators into Philadelphia’s classrooms and across the nation. “If I’m going to be serious about trying to change the lives of Black educators and hence the lives of Black children, then it just can’t be my night and weekend job,” he said.