ARREST THAT PROCRASTINATING BLACK MAN FOR HIS OWN GOOD!

The man who destroyed Jim Crow had to know the Constitution better than the Supreme Court had allowed it to be known and trust its precepts more than the framers had themselves. [See below]

Both conventional wisdom and available evidence would seem to agree that men are reluctant to visit the doctor unless absolutely necessary, and that this is especially true of black men. Reasons for this proclivity to act against self-interest vary of course, but the bottom line is that men procrastinate about taking care of their health.

So here’s a prescription: Call your father, brother, adult son, uncle, nephew, cousin, neighbor, co-worker, friend, or significant male other and tell him to go TODAY, THIS EVENING, BETWEEN 5:30 and 8:30 PM over to the Cleveland Clinic Main Campus, Glickman Tower, on Euclid Avenue at East 96 St, for the 10^th Annual Cleveland Clinic Minority Men’s Health Fair.

There he can choose among an abundance of FREE HEALTH SCREENINGS for a variety of concerns either he has or that you may have for him, including:

Blood Pressure

Body Mass Index (BMI)

Bone Density

Cholesterol

Diabetes (blood sugar)

Dental screening

Glaucoma (eye)

Heart Disease

Hepatitis C

HIV

Lung Health

Kidney Function

Oral Cancer

Prostate Cancer

Sickle Cell

Skin Cancer

Stress/Depression

Wellness

Parking is FREE and he is sure to run into some of his good buddies. Tell him that if he goes early he can get home in time to see the Browns make their first selection, or he can hang around the Fair and join in the collective cheer or groan when the pick is announced/traded bungled.

This is Minority Health Month and a Minority Men’s Health Fair, but it is open to ALL MEN.

He can register in person at the Fair or Pre-register by visiting www.clevelandclinic.org/mmhc  

For more information, visit www.clevelandclinic.org/mmhc 

• • •

GCUFF REDUX

Procrastinators of a different stripe who missed last week’s successful debut of the Greater Cleveland Urban Film Fest can get a taste of what they missed TONIGHT ONLY at an encore presentation of two of the more talked about films: The Contradictions of Fair Hope and Happy Sad. Both films will be shown at Shaker Square Cinema, at 6PM and 8PM respectively.

“Contradictions” is a documentary treatment of a little known aspect of American history, when newly freed slaves throughout the South formed “benevolent societies” to respond to the abject hunger, illness and the fear of a pauper’s grave. The documentary sets the stage in rural Alabama, prior to Emancipation, and traces the development, struggles, contributions and gradual loss of tradition of one of the last remaining African American benevolent societies, known as “The Fair Hope Benevolent Society” in Uniontown, Alabama. The film is narrated by Whoopi Goldberg and co-directed by S. Epatha Merkerson of Law and Order fame.

“Happy Sad” is a tender and vibrant coming of age story. Mandy, a high school footballer from the ghettos of Trinidad is shipped off to the idyllic island of Tobago to live with her great uncle Cephas (Bill Cobbs). Fury and fear keep Mandy from seeing the beauty all around her. Soon the island itself becomes a character that helps Mandy overcome her inner demons. 2009. Directed by Dianah Wynter.

Tickets may be purchased at the box office. GCUFF passes are no longer valid.

The Festival’s three-minute promo can be seen here. It was shown before every film during the Festival and was especially well done. Check it out.

• • •

AN AMAZING STORY

There would have been no Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. without an extraordinarily important cadre of people who planned, strategized, and acted with conviction and courage for years and even decades to prepare the way for the headliners to be written into history of civil rights heroes.

Similarly, there would have been no Thurgood Marshall, A. Leon Higginbotham, or Barack Obama had it not been for a brilliant, visionary attorney named Charles Hamilton Houston, architect of Howard Law School, and the strategic legal campaign that reached its dramatic zenith in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Tonight, Rev. Zachery R. Williams, Ph.D., will lead an informed discussion about this historic episode in civil rights and American history, based on the book, Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall and the Struggle to End Segregation.

Tonight’s discussion is part of an ongoing dialogue on the Civil Rights Movement that focuses on the organizing and other skills of a quartet of leaders, including A. Phillip Randolph and Ella Baker, in addition to Houston and Marshall.

The series is presented by The National Institute for Restorative Justice at Deuteronomy 8:3 Café and Books, 1464 Wade Park Ave, in University Circle.

Tonight’s discussion leader, Zachery Williams, is an assistant history professor at the University of Akron, assistant pastor at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church,  and the author of a fine book, In Search of The Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, about which I wrote briefly here.

  

 

The examination of Houston’s legacy will continue next week when US District Judge Solomon Oliver, chief judge of the Northern District, leads part two of the study of “the man who killed Jim Crow.”

Find further details at www.restorativejusticeinstitute.org.

 • • •

"By now they understood that they were to become social engineers —

to use the law to change the law... Learning the law and learning to think 

like a lawyer were but the elementary steps in becoming social engineers...

The third step... was the most critical: In order to give meaning to steps one and two — if they were to be anything but 'parasites' on their society — African American lawyers were obligated to know what the law should be.

They had to know the Constitution better than the Supreme Court had allowed it to be known and trust its precepts more than the framers had themselves ...

For all his Ivy League education and conservative mien, Dean Houston's

teaching law in this manner was as audacious as the arguments he and his

former students would soon begin presenting to courts across the country."

Rawn James, Jr. 

Giants in Our Midst

My thoughts about this post arrived with that pre-dawn clarity that emerges where lots of the things one has been wrestling with for a long time suddenly find resolution. For me, the last few months have been full of multiple re-connections, recapitulations and reconsiderations. A Journey to Sankofaland, as Alice Coltrane might call it.



Sankofa, as many of you know, is an African term/concept where one looks to the past to prepare for the future. That has certainly been my situation as my late summer and early fall were periods of reunion and reflection, both real and virtual.



The first look back was especially congenial. Four of my confreres from the epic 1960s came to Cleveland for a mini-reunion. We had met at one of America’s most liberal colleges in one of the nation’s most tumultuous times — President Kennedy was assassinated two months after I arrived as a freshman; Martin King was assassinated two months before I graduated. Coming of age at that time and in that space, we bonded in ways that have held firm through more than four decades and sometimes scant contact. We did the downtown happy hour, a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concert, a Saturday morning excursion to the West Side Market, and a mini-tour that encompassed a passage through my old Glenville neighborhood and University Circle before settling in my backyard for well-lubricated repast and talk.



The second look back came with the passing of a family member, Mollye Virginia Jackson Williams, a remarkably joyous, talented, and giving woman who died at 99. Only Alzheimer’s could have dimmed her matchless vitality, which sadly it did for her last decade or so. She was the last survivor of ten remarkable siblings. Read her obituary at the end of this post for a glimpse of those who have worked to redeem America’s promise.



The reunion theme continues for me as the first Andrews Family Reunion in over 40 years takes place this Thanksgiving in Dallas. Not yet sure that I will be there, but I am charged with contributing a piece on my father’s branch. In preparation I pulled out a Texas Trailblazers account of the life of my great-great grandfather, Robert L. Andrews Sr. (1865—1933). A re-read of his story as audacious businessman and civic leader in Houston [he lived on Cleveland Street!] inspired me on a recent milestone birthday to incorporate a new business named for his signature success.



I am a word aficionado. One of my earliest memories is sitting at my father’s feet in the living room of our two-bedroom Howard Manor apartment on the Howard University campus in Washington, DC. I read the comics as he sat in his wing chair, reading the news and stealing a few moments of daily respite. Both my parents spoke and wrote with precision, but it was probably from my dad that I came so early to love the sounds and rhythms of the English language. I still recall in my mind’s ear hearing with fascination hearing the word “Mordecai”. The word never made sense to me but I loved it.



It was only decades later that I realized that Mordecai Johnson was the legendary president of Howard University, where some of my parents’ friends, like James Nabrit, Jimmy Porter and “Dot P” were employed. Very belatedly did I come to appreciate that these adults were world-class achievers.



This has me devouring In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926-1970. Written by University of Akron professor and Cleveland resident Zachery R. Williams, the book examines and argues the important relationship between individual achievement and community culture. While my attraction to it is deeply personal and visceral, I cannot read it without considering its implications for my Cuyahoga arrondissement. I will be reviewing this book soon in this space. I will conclude for now by saying that the book — while focused on a single institution during a defined time —raises questions about race, class, achievement, education, identity, accessibility and community that are arguably more fundamental than our recent county governmental reorganization.

Footnote:

[1] Nabrit was a key member of the legal team in Brown v. Board of Education and later served two terms as Howard’s president. James Porter was a distinguished artist and professor at Howard. His wife, Dorothy, perhaps my mother’s closest friend, was a world-class librarian and archivist. She started and developed Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, which has been described as “the finest collection of black research materials in the world”. My mother, Marjory J. Andrews, was an instructor in Howard’s School of Music.

Appendix:

Mollye Virginia Jackson Williams

April 25, 1911—6 September 6, 2010

Mollye was born in the Allegheny Mountain mining town of Pocahontas, Virginia on 25 April 1911 and died on 6 September 2010 at Judson Park, Bruening Health Center in Cleveland, Ohio. She had been a resident of the Judson Retirement Community since 1997.

Mollye was the ninth child in a family of ten, and the fifth daughter of Robert and Ida Perrow Jackson. Her father worked as a clerk and butcher in Elliott’s General Store, which was privately owned and was in competition with the local (mine owners) company store. Robert’s facility with the Hungarian language enabled Elliott’s to serve the immigrant miners and their families, thus providing a vital edge over the company store.

Mollye began her education in the public schools of Pocahontas and attended high school in Bramwell, West Virginia. In accordance with her parents’ ambition that all of their children attend college, Mollye became the family’s ninth college graduate, finishing West Virginia State College at Institute, W. VA. She later earned a Masters Degree in Business Administration from Columbia University in New York, and a second Masters (of Science) Degree in Special Education from Virginia State University. She was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.

Blessed with boundless energy, high spirits, humor, and a generous nature, Mollye loved nothing better than engaging in talk, light-hearted pursuits and mischievous high jinks with family and friends. Yet, most of her adult life was devoted to helping others. As a young girl, fresh out of college in the 1930s, she took a series of teaching positions at ill-equipped one-room schools for Negro children, operated by the State of Virginia in its rural counties. Here, in addition to dedicated teaching, Mollye also raised funds from the community for books and teaching material, often supporting her work with her own meager salary. She became a one-woman civic committee, organizing and conducting small, makeshift “fairs” and bazaars to raise what funds she could. She also solicited donations of old clothes from adults and, using her sewing skills, set about cutting them down and remaking them to fit her children.

Upon her marriage to Rev. John Francis Williams, Mollye enthusiastically added the responsibilities of a Baptist minister’s wife to the demands of her teaching career. Tapping a deep well of kindness and charm, she assumed an active role in church affairs and became a valuable asset to her husband’s ministry as his calling moved them to Wheeling, WV, New Orleans, Newport News, VA, St. Paul, MN, and finally to Cleveland, OH. With each move, Mollye contributed her efforts to the activities of the local community, and continued her work as a tireless educator and organizer. She was a teacher of the deaf in Newport News. Her last position was with the Special Education Department of the public schools of St. Paul, MN.

In spite of her public responsibilities, privately this little dynamo of a woman remained the same girl who had grown up in a kind, close-knit clan, who never failed to come to the aid of a friend or family member in need. Mollye often said that her family “might not have been rich in material things, but was blessed with an abundance of love.” Although she had no children of her own, she took a benevolent interest in the raising of her eight nieces and nephews to whom she was their beloved, fun-loving “Aunt Mollye” of the brilliant dark eyes and the uniquely raucous infectious laugh. A perfectionist in all things, she was a patient but exacting taskmaster to this younger generation.

Raised to be the quintessential southern lady, Mollye maintained a seemingly effortless, yet impressive standard of living throughout her life. As mistress of the various parsonages she and her husband called home, she created attractive, immaculate surroundings, imbued with an atmosphere of style, whimsy, comfort, and ease.

Mollye Williams leaves behind a legacy of fond memories of loving devotion to family and friends, hard work, good deeds, and numerous lives made better for her having touched them.

She is preceded in death by her four brothers, five sisters and her husband of more than fifty years. She is survived by four nieces and nephews: Miss June Morgan of New York City, Clintona Jackson Hare, Esq. of Morristown, NJ, Stanley Jackson, Esq. of Detroit, and Elbert Hendricks, PhD, of Copenhagen, Denmark.