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 10th
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.
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