Links:The Black Star Project's website:
Black Star Journal:
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Today, The Black Star
Project Begins to Mentor Girls 9 to 14
Years Old in Honor of Endia Martin
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Endia Martin, 14, was shot and
killed in Chicago on April 28th by another 14 year old girl after a Facebook
fight. Click Here to read the full story on
her death.
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Bring Your Girls 9 to
14
Thursday,
May 1, 2014, 6:30 pm
The Black
Star Project
3509 South
King Drive
Chicago, Illinois
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Parents should call 773.285.9600 to enroll
their daughters or nieces into this program. Our first event will be a girl's
fun and crafts day on May 1,
2014.
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New My Brother's Keeper
Rule Means Almost No Black Organizations Can Participate
Who Will Be Able to Participate in My Brother's Keeper? The 45 state
rule requirement would mean that small community based organizations would be
out of the running for funding.
By lauren victoria burke
April 30, 2014
A letter sent to the Obama
Administration expressed concerns that a new grant requirement in the My
Brother's Keeper initiative would effectively exclude almost all African
American social, civic and mentoring organizations from
participating.
The new rule (at bottom) requirement for My Brother's
Keeper grant eligibility states that applicants must be "national organizations
defined as having active chapters or subawardees in at least 45 states."
A letter expressing concern over the change, written by the
national President of 100 Black Men of America,
Inc., states that President Obama originally announced on February 24, 2014
that a group must have a "active presence" in 30 states - not 45. Brown's
letter requests a reversal of the rule change. See the entire letter here.
The change from 30 to 45 states would effectively mean that
almost no Black civic, social or mentoring organizations, other than perhaps the
NAACP, would be eligible for funding under My Brother's Keeper. Only the NAACP
has a "active presence" in at least 45 states.
The 45 state rule requirement would mean that small community
based organizations would be out of the running for funding.
"I am writing to express our concern for the change in
direction for the President's My Brother's Keeper initiative," wrote Michael J.
Brown, President of 100 Black Men of America, in a letter to the Department of
Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The letter was
dated April 28, 2014.
Brown added that the requirement
change, "dashed any hopes that such venerable institutions as the National Urban
League, the NAACP and each of the nine Historically Black Greek Letter
Organizations may have had in competing in this significant funding
opportunity."
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This ruling eliminates The Black Star Project and almost every other
Black male achievement program from participating in the My
Brother's Keeper initiative.
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The Community Plan to Reduce Violence in
Chicago
(If you are failing to plan, you are planning to
fail.)
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Inspired by the peacemaking
efforts of The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan in Chicago, the Fruit of Islam
men of Muhammad Mosque No. 45 in Houston took to the streets to promote peace on
July 16, 23 & 28, 2012. The brothers visited the Southwest Side. And also
Crestmont and Villa Americana Apartment Complexes in the Southeast area. (Photo
by Jesse Muhammad)
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Community Asking for a
Re-Direct of
$100 Million in Police
Overtime in 2013
to $100 Million in Community
Literacy, Mentoring, Parenting and Employment Programs to Reduce
Violence
The
community plan includes:
1)
Establish and fund 8 Community Enterprise Zones for $12 million each with police
overtime money, which will include job training, entrepreneurship, small
business development, jobs and corporate/community partnerships in the
communities with the highest rates of violence. A community advisory board made
up of community members and some government officials will govern the Community
Enterprise Zones.
2)
Establish Community Safety Patrols of community members that will operate on
main thorough fares, in business districts, at transportation hubs and in the
communities with the highest rates of violence. These men and women are not
police officers will not have police powers. Their job is to promote community
safety in ways that the police cannot. We would request The Nation of Islam to do
the training of the Community Safety Patrols.
3)
Establish a street corner mentoring of young men that puts mentors in the lives
of young men on street corners, at liquor stores, at barbershops and other
places that these young men frequent. Arm these mentors with resources that
include educational opportunities, fatherhood programs, employment
opportunities, expungement, recreational activities, gang deactivation programs
and other needed resources.
4)
initiate a "Ban the Box" legislative initiative to de-criminalize citizens who
are returning to their communities from prison. They have served their time.
This will help rebuild the workforce and family units in these
communities.
5)
Establish a Community Clean-up Corps of young men cleaning, building and
beautifying the communities of which some of them are now
terrorizing.
Please call Chicago's City Hall at 312.744.5000 and ask for the Mayor's
Office or go to www/cityofchicago.org and click
on "Contact us" to request this plan. Please request that the City of Chicago
support and implement the "The Community Plan to Reduce
Violence!"
Click Here to see the men from the
Nation of Islam, Mosque No. 45 bring discipline, order, peace and hope to the
streets of Houston.
Please call The Black Star Project at 773.285.9600
for more information about this
plan.
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Is Chicago Reverting Back to Education before Brown
versus the Topeka Board of Education in 1954 with one school system for Whites
and one for Blacks?
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Report: Chicago's Top Public Schools Admit More White
Students
By Erin Carson
April 28, 2014
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Northside College Prep (Photo provided by
The Black Star Project)
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Chicago's top-ranked public high
schools have enrolled more white students in the years following a judge's 2009
decision to strike down a desegregation decree, reports the Chicago Sun-Times.
The four "selective-enrollment"
schools -- Walter Payton College Prep, Jones College Prep, Northside College
Prep and Whitney Young College Prep -- lead the district in test scores, and are
frequent targets for white applicants, according to the paper.
Since U.S. District Judge Charles
P. Kocoras ended a 1980 agreement to desegregate the city's schools -- which had
capped the percentage of white students at 35 percent -- the North Side's Payton
has seen a spike in white student admissions, up 41 percent in 2013 from 29
percent four years ago.
Meanwhile, the Class of 2018 at
Jones, on the South Side, is 38 percent white as compared to 29 percent in 2009.
At Whitney Young, on the West Side, statistics show a downward trend in black
freshmen enrollment and an uptick in the percent of white students admitted.
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An all Black school in Chicago
(Photo provided by
The Black Star Project)
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"We saw that coming in 2009,"
Julie Woestehoff, executive director of the organization Parents United for
Responsible Education, tells the Sun-Times, adding: "I consider these schools to
be gated communities for children of privilege."
The city is pouring more
resources into these schools amid ongoing tension between CPS and supporters of
lesser-performing institutions that risk being shuttered in the wake of last
year's mass closures.
Jones recently enlarged its
incoming freshmen class to include some extra 100 students while Payton is
undergoing an expansion. Last week, Mayor Rahm
Emanuel announced that the city will open a new selective-enrollment high
school, named for President Obama, on the North Side in 2017 with $60 million in tax increment financing and a goal of enrolling
1,200 students. |
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A Loyal Black Star Member Featured in Chicago Tribune
on Issues of Education, Violence and Community
Culture
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Trice: Shoring up the abandoned
class
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Marc Sims, a lifelong South
Sider and limo driver, stands outside a Chicago elementary school. He believes
the answer to Chicago's violence and poverty is education. (Antonio Perez,
Chicago Tribune)
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April 28, 2014
Marc Sims is not a politician. He's not a
preacher. He's not a police officer. Nor is he a professor of sociology or an
executive director of a nonprofit.
Marc Sims is a limousine driver,
a lifelong South Sider, who traverses the city's more affluent neighborhoods and
suburbs and gets an almost daily reminder of the sharp contrasts in opportunity
and well-being in Chicago's communities.
He believes that in the battle to
combat gun violence, there's something everybody can do and must do. No job is
too big or too small, and defeat is only imminent when people feel powerless to
do anything.
Since 1991, Sims, 51, has been
the host of a cable-access show called "Viewpoint." On the show and in his blog,
he is strident, and his views are at times Bill Cosby-esque. Remember that the
famous comedian said: "The lower economic people are not holding up their end of
the deal. These people are not parenting."
"Right now, a lot of folks I know (who moved away) would
never move back to the South Side because of the crime and 'those people' and
'that element.' You can talk about the history here, the culture, how close you
are to downtown. It used to be there were places you avoided, but now everywhere
seems sketchy whether it is or not."
He
recalls that it was about the mid-1990s when his community began to change. A
few home burglaries and car thefts evolved into drug dealing and drive-bys. He
said some of his neighbors left fairly immediately. Others tried to hold on, but
eventually they moved too.
"You began to see that there were
so few men left," he said. "The kids might see a man at school, the gym teacher
or the custodian. But there were no men going to work in a suit and tie. And
that makes a difference."
He refers to the dispirited young
men who now hang out on the corners and the young women who have babies too soon
as part of the abandoned class.
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Reduce
Truancy;
Improve
Educational Outcomes
April
24, 2014
Dear Friends,
When
children are chronically absent from school, their educational outcomes diminish
and state funding for the school district dries up. That is
happening here in Chicago, where more than 10 percent of students in Chicago
Public Schools were truant four or more weeks during the 2010-2011 school
year.
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| Illinois State Rep. Chapa
LaVia |
Last year, I sponsored legislation
establishing a task force to study the truancy and absenteeism crisis in CPS.
This task force has gathered input from Chicago communities on the effectiveness
of current CPS truancy policies and what can be done to improve attendance in
the city.
On Saturday, join us for this public discussion on truancy. I
sit on this task force along with state Representative Linda Chapa LaVia. Here
are the event details:
Truancy in
CPS Task Force Public Hearing
Saturday,
May 3, 2:30 - 4 p.m. Doors open 2 p.m.
Pilgrim
Baptist Church of South Chicago
3235
East 91st Street, Chicago, IL 60619
Improving
attendance not only improves educational outcomes. Because state aid is based on
attendance, reducing absenteeism will also bring in more money to our district.
If we can improve attendance in CPS by just one percentage point, CPS will
receive an extra $8 million in state
funding.
Please join the discussion on this
issue of pressing importance to our
community.
Sincerely,
Senator Jacqueline
Collins
16th District -
Illinois |
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The Black Star
Project
and their work with
Autism
Please call 708-296-5651 for more
information
Please click here to donate to The
Answer Inc.
Please click here to learn more about The
Answer Inc. |
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Hear
Kelley Williams-Bolar
Speak About Going to Jail
For Trying to Get a Good Education for Her
Daughters
Saturday, May
10, 2014
1:00 pm at The MET
(Metropolitan Apostolic Church)
4100 South King Drive
Chicago, Illinois
Admission Free - Please RSVP
We need 20
sponsors at $100.00 each to sponsor Ms. Williams-Bolar's travel, board and
speaking fees for this event.
Please call
773.285.9600 to RSVP for this event or to help sponsor this event.
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Black Men United
are sponsoring
No Murders In
May
Mother's Day
Luncheon
in
Omaha,
Nebraska
Black Men United in partnership with
Goodwill Industries Omaha and Risen Son Baptist Church are challenging the city
of Omaha to stop killing one another for at least one
month.
No Murders in May is a gift
we are asking all of Omaha to give to their mothers and grandmothers whose
children will not be able to be with them or to wish them a Happy Mothers Day!
We are pleading with the community to rally around the theme of mothers. In
honor of our mothers and our grandmothers and in honor of our children; No
Murders In May!
We will be honoring mothers and grandmothers who have
lost their children to violence with a Mothers Day Luncheon on Saturday, May 10,
2014 11:00am to 1:00pm at the Goodwill Industries Durham
Room.
Our guest speakers this year will be Ms. Amy Hadan who
lost her 24 yr old daughter on December 15, 2013 at 108th and Q Street when her
daughter, a mother and pre school teacher heard gunfire and while trying to run
from it, ran into the line of fire and Tabatha Manning who lost her 5 year old
daughter Payton Benson while she was sitting at her kitchen table eating
breakfast. We are so appreciative that these two strong dynamic women have
agreed to participate.
We hope in some small way, this
luncheon shows the love, support and admiration we have for our mothers and
grandmothers who have had to bury their child. Today! We honor and salute
you!
Click Here to Register for
No Murders in May Mother's Day Luncheon.
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