Karamu’s 'Juneteenth' is a winner!

50,000 viewers see Karamu artists channel black sentiment in response to public health crises of race and COVID

Mariama Whyte, center, sings with cast members in an opening scene in Karamu House's "Freedom on Juneteenth."

By R. T. Andrews

I’m not a theater critic. This is not a review. But it is a hearty and unqualified recommendation of Karamu’s tight, professional, educational and emotionally thrilling production of Freedom on Juneteenth that debuted last Friday across a variety of platforms.

The sixty minute production, brilliantly conceived and extraordinarily well-executed, used the arts to yoke the long and complicated history of black people in America to the unprecedented times our nation and the world are experiencing today. 'Freedom' employed music, dance, and the spoken word in a seamless march across centuries before an aggregated audience of more than 50,000 people, who saw the program from a variety of modern day platforms — including Roku, YouTube, Vimeo, Fire TV and Facebook — projecting images and sounds from the small but mighty historic Karamu stage.

Gabrielle Shipley, center, and Soursop dance company perform in "Freedom on Juneteenth."

The unique production — conceived, written and produced within 10 days as a response to the murder of George Floyd — gained pre-performance attention from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, which no doubt contributed to the nationwide audience that made this Karamu’s most successful production from a viewership standpoint. 

The show was taken down from its original platforms after 24 hours. It will be re-broadcast, along with the pre-recorded panel discussion that followed, on Monday, June 29 at 8PM EST/5PM PST and Sunday, July 5 at 3PM EST / 12PM PST. The entire 90 minutes will be available on Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, Fire TV and Roku.

Prophet Seay performs as a griot, or storyteller,
in Karamu House's "Freedom on Juneteenth."

Karamu president, CEO and artistic director Tony Sias and his entire team deserve major kudos for this effort. Remarkably, the production was filmed over two days and produced within the following two days to air on Friday, June 19. 

One of the many high points for this viewer was the recitation of Claude McKay’s defiant poem, If We Must Die, by Karamu veteran Ananias Dixon. Other poetic works were from Karamu pioneer and Harlem Renaissance wunderkind Langston Hughes, the playwright Mary E. Weems, and the multi-talented Daniel Gray-Kontar of Twelve Literary Arts.

The show will be re-broadcast on Monday, June 29 and Sunday, July 5.

The performance was produced at breakneck pace under the press not only of the calendar but also an ongoing health pandemic. Karamu’s management implemented numerous measures to ensure compliance with CDC regulations and recommendations. All individuals were double-screened with symptom questionnaires and temperature checks. Masks were worn at all times when social distancing was not completely guaranteed. Only certain numbers of people were allowed in the theatre at any given time. Additionally, the entire facility was used for dressing rooms to ensure that every performer could maintain ample distance.

The production was followed by  a panel of community leaders who reacted to the production. Panelists included Edward M. Barksdale, Jr., Surgeon-in-Chief, University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital; Judge Patricia Ann Blackmon, Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals; and Chenoa Miller, Youth Activist/Organizer, and Brand Ambassador, EmpowerCLE. Each brought unique insights to bear in responding to the production. 

Dr. Barksdale, for example, noted that "it does not take a  halo or a set of wings to move things forward. It takes resolve."

Judge Blackmon expressed her love for General Order No. 3, the declaration that informed the slaves in Galveston Texas, that they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. She observed that the order didn't speak merely of freedom; it spoke of equality. "That's what Black Lives Matter is saying!"

The judge had an excellent suggestion about how technology could operate to counter police officers who turn off their police cameras; central police headquarters should turn them back on automatically. 

It was especially welcome to have Ms Miller's voice; too often we give lip service to the next generation in lieu of having them participate and speak their own truth.

The program was the first in Karamu's new monthly Social Justice series. The next program will be July 23, 2020 at 7PM and will focus on policing and criminal justice. 

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Photo Credit: Kayla Lupean

Ohio Supreme Court O.K.'s process giving homes to developers without compensating Owners or Taxpayers

In 2019, Taxpayers lost at least $11.25 million via administrative foreclosure, while Homeowners and Banks lost up to $77 Million 

By Lucia Walinchus

This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism.  

The Ohio Supreme Court

The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that an unusual foreclosure process that can result in people’s homes being sold without compensation for their equity should remain legal in the Buckeye State.

However, in a recently released opinion the state justices couldn’t agree on the reasoning behind it. 

Justice Judith French authored the lead opinion, joined by Justices Michael Donnelly and Robert Hendrickson. (Justice Robert A. Hendrickson, of the Twelfth District Court of Appeals, replaced Justice Melody Stewart.) They declined to comment on the constitutional issues presented by the case involving what are called “administrative foreclosures,” saying that they would not stop the process because the law governing these procedures was not “patently and unambiguously” unconstitutional. 

Not to be confused with expedited foreclosures, administrative foreclosures send abandoned properties to a county’s board of revision, a committee that usually considers home values for property owners wanting to contest their taxes. The board can then give foreclosed properties to the local land bank, which can clear any debts on the property and give them to local businesses to revamp and resell.

Elliot Feltner, a Cleveland landowner, sued the board in 2018 arguing that the process was an unconstitutional government seizure without compensation. The board had foreclosed upon his property, worth $144,500 in county records. In a sheriff’s sale, the state would have recovered the $68,089 owed to taxpayers and he would have received the rest. But under the BOR foreclosure, both he and the state got nothing. 

Eye on Ohio previously reported on thousands BOR foreclosures in Montgomery and Cuyahoga Counties in 2019. In those cases, local land banks wiped out at least $11.2 million in tax liens. Homeowners and banks lost up to $77 million in home equity. 

Though they lost, Feltner’s counsel, former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, filed the opinion as a Notice of Supplemental Authority in both federal cases where he is litigating similar issues, one in Montgomery County and one in Cuyahoga County. 

“One of the things we have to prove is that there’s no adequate remedy under state law. And I think the fact that Mr. Feltner was turned down demonstrates that people who have their properties taken who have equity, and have their properties given to government entities without payment, they don’t have any good remedies under law in the state courts because of the way the statute was structured,” Dann said. 

Opposing Counsel Gus Frangos said the administrative foreclosure process was an important way to prevent blight. 

“In the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis, there was rampant vacancy and abandonment, and tax delinquencies where people just abandoned their properties so whole neighborhoods were decimated. In 2006 we were seeing all this stuff coming, although Washington didn’t really see it. So there was an expedited foreclosure process in place in 2008 and it caused foreclosures to just skyrocket.”

Frangos was the primary drafter of the expedited foreclosure process and runs its largest program in Cuyahoga County. 

“The fallacy of all of this is that somehow people’s property has been taken. They’ve abandoned it, they have to pay taxes. You know, you and I have to pay taxes on our properties. And so that somebody doesn’t, and now they want to turn around and change the narrative to, ‘oh no my property, my valuable property was taken,’” Frangos said.

“At what point does it become a harm to all the surrounding neighborhoods, these properties?” he continued. “So number one, it applies to them. And number two, these cases don’t just happen when a person wakes up and loses his property. They get letters. They get served with notice. They get an opportunity to appear. And they ignore it all. They have an opportunity to come in and appear and get on a payment plan. So if you’re delinquent, and you can’t pay, you can get on a payment plan. If somebody feels they had a lot of equity in their home, all they have to do is pick up the phone and call a Realtor and sell it. The nanny state idea that we should babysit somebody who has totally neglected their obligation to pay taxes, at some point that becomes an affront.”

At the Ohio Supreme Court, Justice Sharon Kennedy agreed to the judgment, but not the reasoning behind it. 

Justice Pat DeWine also ruled for the county, but in a concurring opinion he laid out very different reasons: He said that the court should have addressed the constitutional issues, but that administrative foreclosures were very similar to normal taxing practices in the nineteenth century. 

Justice Patrick Fischer and Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor also agreed on the outcome, but they wrote a concurring opinion explaining their reasoning. They said the case should have been dismissed for procedural reasons, but the constitutional issues “cannot and should not be avoided” and that the lead opinion used “circular reasoning” to avoid getting to the heart of the issue. 

“The whole scheme is unsettling and just seems wrong,” Fischer wrote.

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Racism and Public Health • Converging Viruses Wreak Havoc in Black Communities

David B. Miller

William Hanage

By David B. Miller and William Hanage

Special to The Real Deal

In recent months the world has witnessed the ravages visited upon the United States by two viruses — COVID-19 and racism — that are affecting African Americans in acute and chronic fashion. The acute effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, from higher morbidity and mortality rates from the infection, to skyrocketing unemployment, have so far has been disproportionately borne by minority communities, especially black people.

This is no accident — it is a disaster foretold in the data that show African Americans are more vulnerable to negative health outcomes of all kinds.

COVID-19 has laid bare our society's fault lines, throwing inequalities into stark relief, and few inequalities can match the long unfolding consequences of the founding sin of the United States.

The pandemic has unfolded against a background of chronic legitimized violence, arising from the virus of racism. Four weeks ago the entire world witnessed nearly nine minutes of video depicting state sanctioned lethal police violence against George Floyd. Appallingly, he is only the most recent unarmed black man to have panted the words ‘I can’t breathe’ in his final moments.  Only a few weeks earlier we saw the hunting down and slaughter of another unarmed black man by armed self-appointed representatives of “law enforcement”. These videos portray the deadly manifestations of the virus that is racism. How many similar events have occurred over the years away from the lens of a cellphone camera?

Racism, like the coronavirus, is a transmissible disease.

The convergence of these two viruses is showing more and more Americans the devastating consequences of racism in this country. Like the coronavirus, racism is a transmissible disease; it is passed on through vectors in the media and society, and within families. But unlike COVID-19, the racism virus does not visit its most dreadful effects upon those who are infected with it.

Those infected with racism target others based on the color of their skin — overwhelmingly in the United States those with black skin. The wearers of the skin are marked throughout society in ways too exhausting to list. At worst the result is death to the wearer of the hated, excluded skin.

The men and women who are sworn to protect and serve a community are not immune to racism. The extraordinary power of the racism virus to elicit anxiety and fear too often leads to senseless confrontations that end with black mothers crying and communities marching for justice.

While all known COVID-19 infections descend from a common ancestor a little more than 6 months ago,  the virus of racism is ancient and has evolved and mutated into many different forms. At times, it erupts with fear and lethal rage when those wearing black skin are merely walking home at night with Skittles or playing with a toy gun in a playground.

While we expect the intense global search for a vaccine for COVID-19 will succeed, we can only hope that the reckoning George Floyd’s murder has spurred will be sustained long enough to begin the difficult but necessary conversations and steps needed to eradicate the racism virus.

Since the start of the pandemic we have seen armed mobs protesting shutdowns, shouting (many without masks) at law enforcement officers who exhibited great restraint, lifting nary a finger, baton, or weapon to repel those "protesters". In addition, those “protesters” received support and encouragement from the White House. Yet that same White House directed law enforcement officers to use force against unarmed peaceful citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble peacefully in a public space. Is it a coincidence that they were protesting against racism?

What's most essential during this pandemic: brunch, blackjack or protest?

As public health professionals we are often asked about the impact of anti-racist protests on the pandemic. The answer is nuanced. Despite the best efforts of organizers to supply masks, hand sanitizer and encourage physical distancing, protests offer opportunities for the virus to transmit that are only enhanced by police actions that limit the ability to maintain distancing. Tear gas, and arrests compound the dangers,  especially because transmission of the virus is associated with poorly ventilated spaces.

As states open up, the opportunities for transmission that arise from the protests will dwindle in comparison to the close encounters that will occur in casinos, tattoo parlors, bars and restaurants. Given there is an historic pandemic going on, what is most essential: brunch, roulette or protesting against racial injustice?

No cure for the virus of racism will be discovered in a laboratory or another “blue ribbon” commission studying police violence. Instead this calls for a reckoning of the hearts and souls of each citizen of this nation. We can no longer close our eyes to how racism continues to place a knee on the collective necks of black Americans. The pandemic offers an opportunity to divide us, which has been avidly taken up by elements of the right-wing broadcast media who focus on maintaining inequality, rather than dismantling it.

Racism is likely to be a problem in the United States after the pandemic is done with us. It has led to untold deaths over the years, including the unequal society that places people of color at risk in the current pandemic. If the protesters now marching against that unequal society can do anything to change that and shift this country to a better place, we will owe them all a debt of gratitude.

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David B. Miller, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Social Work at the Jack, Joseph, & Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

William “Bill” Hanage, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Epidemiology at T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University.