20th annual summit on Black males set for Oct. 17
13th October 2014 · 0 Comments
While post-Katrina New Orleans has experienced tremendous progress and some quality of life improvements, Pastor Tom Watson, organizer of the 20th Annual Citywide Summit on the African-American Male, argues “that there still exists the ‘tale of two cities’ when juxtaposed with the harsh realities of African-American males living in New Orleans.” Fifty-two percent of New Orleans African-American men are unemployed; disproportionate numbers of Black men and boys are still being incarcerated in mass numbers; the NOPD continues overuse of serious force or racial profiling (noted in the Consent Decree) and, nationally, a recurring trend of unarmed Black men being murdered by police could make New Orleans ripe to become the next Ferguson, Missouri.
Former Mayor Marc Morial is the summit’s speaker. The summit is free and open to the public, as it is intended to elevate a participatory solution-based dialogue addressing these issues with community residents and a distinguished panel of local experts/stakeholders including: Dr. Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University; Dr. Patrice Sams-Abiodun, executive director of the Lindy Boggs National Center for Community Literacy at Loyola University and co-author of Recognizing the Underutilized Economic Potential of Black Men in New Orleans; Jason Williams, New Orleans Councilman At-Large; and Kenneth Polite, U.S. Attorney will weigh-in on the state of Black men and boys in this city.
The conference, sponsored by Watson Memorial Teaching Ministries & The Family Center of Hope, will include a series of rap sessions and workshops for 300 school-age males titled “Stoppin Murders” on Friday, from 9:00 a.m. to noon.
National Urban League president and CEO Marc Morial will deliver the keynote address on Friday at 7:00 p.m.
The Healing Mothers—Helping Mothers Heal Conference will take place on Saturday, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
As an outgrowth of the 2012 Conference on The African American Male, Helping Mother’s Heal was born as an intervention to aid mothers and families victimized by the murder of their sons. Due to the overwhelming outcry for help, this year’s conference will feature a new convening for victim’s mothers and their families. Mothers will address law enforcement and justice system officials and share with them their grief from these egregious crimes and a persistent, lingering source of their pain, the fact that their loved ones’ murders remain unsolved. District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, Crimestoppers Darlene Costanza, Juvenile Judge Ernestine Gray and Interim Police Chief Michael Harrison have agreed to take part in the conference. “Our purpose is to turn these mothers’ pain into purpose,” the Rev. Patricia Watson, founder and executive director of the Family Center of Hope, explained.
Registration for the conference is $35. To register, call (504) 891-3264 or visit www.fchnola.com.
“These two very important convenings are about bringing community residents together to have a voice,” explains Pastor Tom Watson. “We cannot wait for top-down government solutions to the issues related to violence that affect us—hence, the conference attempts to explore and influence better outcomes and greater accountability for prevention and intervention.”
The conference promises to focus on many of the same issues being addressed in the community by civil rights groups and grassroots organizations like poverty, unemployment, underfunded public schools and unconstitutional policing.
Last week, Community United for Change asked the seven members of the New Orleans City Council for help in ensuring that civilians have a voice in selecting the city’s next police chief. The group asked the Council to help it to ensure that everyday people had a say in who becomes the city’s next police chief rather than assigning that task to politically connected people who may not be committed to bring constitutional policing to New Orleans.
For more than three years, CUC organized and hosted community forums that brought members of the community whose loved ones were victims of unconstitutional policing with representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice. Those efforts paved the way for the indictment and conviction of officers involved in the murder of Henry Glover and the Danziger Bridge shootings that left two unarmed civilians dead and four others wounded.
Since then, an online posting scandal involving several federal prosecutors and other prosecutorial mistakes have led to the acquittal of one previously convicted officer and the granting of new trials for a number of officers convicted in the Danziger Bridge shootings.
Efforts by CUC and other grassroots and civil rights organizations to become actively involved in the implementation of the federally mandated NOPD consent decree have been rebuffed by the federal monitor, Washington, DC-based Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton.
Despite the consent decree, which the DOJ began implementing in August 2013, the NOPD continues to resist efforts to overhaul the embattled department, as evidenced by a recent officer-involved shooting during which a body camera was turned off shortly before a suspect was shot in the head. The incident went unreported for two days before NOPD Supt. Ronal Serpas blamed it on a mistake by a public information officer. Serpas announced his retirement shortly thereafter.
In a letter to The Louisiana Weekly Thursday, anti-crime activist Nadra Enzi talked about the exclusion of Black men’s voices in efforts to overhaul the NOPD.
“This city has an acting police superintendent who, while Black, is directed by a white mayor openly hostile to Black input directly not in his employ or grant recipients,” Enzi wrote.
“Our Independent Police Monitor’s office has no Black men on its staff.
“Black men, who aren’t employees nor grant recipients, let alone independent ones active in crime prevention, are voiceless in the federal consent decree process and mediation efforts with NOPD,” Enzi continued.
“American Brothers Against Crime (ABC) wonders how can there be real police reform in New Orleans when every other group but independent Black men have a voice in the process?
“Is this 2014… or 1814?”
Community leaders say it is important to view the senseless violence in New Orleans as part of a larger problem that negatively impacts the lives of many of the city’s residents daily.
“It is pointless to seek ways to stop the violence in New Orleans without first stopping the educational apartheid in the public school system, blatant discrimination in the economic sector and the reign of terror of the New Orleans Police Department,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly. “Until there is economic justice, better educational opportunities for children of color in this city and a complete overhaul of the criminal justice system, there can be no peace.”
Still, he lauded the organizers of this week’s Black male summit’s efforts to turn things around.
“This is a major battle with many fronts,” Aha said. “We need as many people as we can find asking the difficult questions and seeking solutions to the myriad of ills that plague Black men and boys.”
The Family Center of Hope, Inc., operates as a holistic institution of education and social services from a faith-based perspective to the entire family. Project Restore and Helping Mothers Heal are signature programs of FCH. These services are designed to address and affect change in the areas of community violence, drug use, school dropouts, teenage parenting and other dysfunctions within families. At the core of the center’s philosophy is a deeply embedded set of values about families and the nature of how help should be extended to them. This philosophy encompasses a holistic approach to services.
This article originally published in the October 13, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
