Washington Informer

Mary J. Corey, whose personal warmth was matched by a drive that led her to become the first woman in The Baltimore Sun's 176-year history to head its newsroom, died Tuesday of breast cancer.

The Sun's senior vice president and director of content, who was 49, essentially grew up at her hometown paper, joining it as a college intern and rising through its reporting and editing ranks. She led The Sun to regional Newspaper of the Year honors during the past two years and spearheaded new print and digital sections while building on its tradition of investigative journalism.

"Mary was an outstanding colleague and a wonderful person," said Timothy E. Ryan, publisher, president and CEO of The Baltimore Sun. "When I had the opportunity to select her as editor in 2010, I knew she would be an extraordinary leader for our team. Amid an unprecedented information revolution, Mary used her leadership and creativity to position The Sun for the future. She was exceptionally adept at driving the vital work of the newsroom while embracing opportunities for growth in the digital age.

"She was a friend and mentor to many here, and I will miss her both as a colleague and a friend."

(The Baltimore Sun)

See more at: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obituaries/bs-md-corey-obituary-20130226,0,4878616,full.story#sthash.puXCEr70.dpuf

Under leadership of the Rev. Dr. Frank D. Tucker, First Baptist Church in Northwest hosted a 150th anniversary celebration featuring iconic gospel article Shirley Caesar. The event was held Saturday Feb. 23 at the Lincoln Theatre on historic U Street.

Pastor Shirley Caesar has traveled the world spreading the Word and breaking down barriers for other gospel artists. The 11-time Grammy Award winner has truly exemplified gospel music to the core. She has performed for U.S. presidents and world leaders, yet is also at home pastoring to a thriving church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

Shirley Caesar started out in the early 1960s singing with the gospel group "The Caravans," before going on to become a solo artist in 1966. During her stellar career, Caesar has released more than 30 solo albums.

After 150 years of holding up the banner of Christ, the congregation at First Baptist Church in Northwest paused to celebrate the great things God has done.

The desire was to make known the struggles and blessings of our amazing "Journey of Faith" that began in 1861, when a group of former slaves from Caroline, Spotsylvania, Louisa and Orange counties, Va., assembled on the government camp grounds at 6th and B Streets in Southwest Washington.

Aided by white ministers from the Freedmen's Bureau, the group held meetings and prayed. A council of white and colored ministers was called to recognize this body of Christians as a church.

As the first organized Baptist church in Southwest, we were named the "First Baptist Church of Southwest Washington" in1863. Throughout the years, the church has grown tremendously in membership and ministries. There have been 13 pastors and three church homes in our history.

In 1958, the First Baptist Church of Southwest moved to its present location at 712 Randolph St. in Northwest.

In addition to the beautiful edifice of worship, the church has acquired four properties and extended their ministries to include a Child Development Center, Senior Center, and Community Health and Outreach Services (Church Association for Community Services, Alcoholic Anonymous meetings, and the AIDS Conversation Center), to name a few.

The church began 2013 with a season of praying and fasting. The year-long celebration will feature concerts, fashions from different periods, gospel proclamations, and reflections on the journey.

They will also publish the history of the fellowship and a pictorial directory of current members and highlight First Baptist's worldwide influence through a foreign mission conference and support service.

DIASPORA CHALLENGE

1. Between 1500 and 1807, how many Black Britons were believed to have lived in England?

a) Between 5,000 – 10,000

b) Between 10,000 – 20,000

c) More than 50,000

2. The Nigerian film industry is the second largest in the world. What is it affectionately known as?

a) Nigerialand

b) Dream Cinema

c) Bollywood

3. In 1948, first generation of migrant workers from the Caribbean traveled to England, and played an integral part in the origins of multi-cultural Britain. What was the name of the steamship upon which they traveled?

a) SS Empire Windrush

b) SS Queen Elizabeth II

c) SS Southampton

4. Haiti's Founding Fathers are made up of four legendary men: Francois Dominique Toussaint Louverture, Henri Christophe, Alexandre Petion and _______________?

a) Michel Jacques

b) Jean Jacques Dessalines

c) Etienne Joseph

5. Under the system of South African apartheid, white landowners moved the Khosian people from their homes into shantytowns and took possession of what percentage of the land?

a) 60 percent

b) 72 percent

c) 87 percent

Answers:

1. 10,000 – 20,000

2. Bollywood

3. SS Empire Windrush

4. Jean Jacques Dessalines

5. 87 percent

"I hate history because you can only go so far back in time before all of the black people are in chains and despair. It's embarrassing," was among the comments I often encountered as a graduate teaching assistant at both the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, and Jackson State University in Mississippi. Even as elders and members of the black literati collectively admonish that not knowing ones past, preemptively obscures their futures, the reality of blackness does not validate one's existence, vindicate one's condition, or embolden greatness among the present-day kindred of ancestors, however brilliant.

But in a space where people of color are at once exotic, the meat of cultural voyeurism, and competition for folks whose imperial expansion adulterated mother-tongues and mores, the Diasporic black experience continues to most aptly be defined as varying manifestations of the white man's burden. So how best to affirm the everyday accomplishments, the intellectual prowess, and the sheer resilience of blacks around the globe, while acknowledging the vile, racist, and dehumanizing malaise through which those things were achieved? Simple: With truth and parity.

There are few absolutes. Not all black people were disenfranchised; nor were all slaves. There were many whites who had both an aversion to slavery and a sincere belief in racial and social equality. African people around the world developed the very arts, languages and sciences for which they are now stereotyped as inherently unable to master. They are the skeletons, the arteries, and the DNA of every civilization under the sun, but hidden in plain view. This Black History Month, our goal at the Informer was to introduce readers to their foremothers and forefathers, as decidedly human, resilient, and exceptional. In our final Black History Month special section, we spotlight a few of the many cultures that encompass Diasporic Black History. Similarities abound and subtle cultural nuances suggest kinships across superficial geographic and language barriers.

One exercise with which my students were challenged when trying to determine how race or blackness functioned on a global scale entailed examining the relationship between the island nation of Haiti and the U.S. from its independence until the death of President John F. Kennedy. The students found that with almost every economic and cultural leap forward by Haiti, there was an equally defiant show of racist maneuvering – including gunboat diplomacy, American-funded attempts to overthrow the government, and constant cultural interventions that disrupted the customs of her people and marginalized Haiti's independence. The people, even after natural disasters and foreign exploitation, remain proud, vibrant and steadfast. Lola Poisson Joseph, founder and executive director of the Children and Families Global Development Fund, and wife of former Haitian Ambassador to the United Stated Raymond Joseph, graciously shares her insight into the Haiti few recognize or acknowledge in this edition.

And while Haiti fought to maintain her identity, other nations, including Guyana, quickly absorbed the English branding of imperial rule – its people becoming (in some cases) more English than the British themselves. When the Crown called upon its numbers to fight in World War II, people of color from the Caribbean to India, answered. At the close of the war, educational and economic opportunities opened in the "Mother Country," and thousands migrated or sent their children to areas in and around London, Cardiff, and Leeds. By the 1960s, the children of these migrants had forged collective identities that merged the best of their parents' and grandparents' cultures with that of their adopted homeland. In this edition of the Informer, journalist and motivational speaker Sherry Ann Dixon details her own migration from British Guyana to London.

At times the formation of racial and cultural identity rested solely in the interpretations of others. Such proved true for thousands of mixed-raced children – generally the product of black American servicemen and non-black women abroad. Barrington Salmon speaks with broadcast journalist Doris McMillon and other German-born children of such unions, who were known collectively as Brown Babies and became part of a trans-Atlantic immigration movement that paired them with African-American adoptive parents.

Please use the Informer Black History special editions as a springboard to additional learning. With the abundance of rich and positive black experiences worldwide, we hope you find something more in the past – no matter how far back you look, besides chains and despair.

Read & Enjoy,

Shantella Y, Sherman

Editor, Special Editions

A firestorm of criticism has erupted involving Cardinal Peter Turkson, who could be next in line to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, all because he has publicly suggested that gay priests are in part to blame for the child sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church that have broken and rippled worldwide.

Turkson,64, who was recently interviewed by CNN about possibly stepping into the highly revered papal spot, discussed the sex scandals and their outreach across the U.S. and Europe — and whether there was a possibility of it reaching African shores.

"Not in the same proportion as we have seen in Europe," Turkson said. "Probably because African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency. Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa, homosexuality, or for that matter, any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society. So, that cultural 'taboo,' that tradition has been there. It's helped to keep this out."

As soon as Turkson made his statement about the Catholic Church sex scandals, he was immediately slammed by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. "We hear less about clergy sex crimes and cover ups in Africa for the same reasons we do throughout the developing world — there tends to be lesser funding for law enforcement, less vigorous civil justice systems, less independent journalism, and an even greater power and wealth difference between church officials and their congregants," a spokesperson for the organization said in a statement via the Daily Mail.

(Source: Ruth Manuel-Logan for CNN)

A prominent state assemblyman from Brooklyn who wore blackface to a party he hosted to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim, said on Monday that he did not mean to hurt anyone.

Dov Hikind, a Democrat and a longtime power broker in the Orthodox Jewish community, donned an Afro wig, brown makeup, an orange jersey and sunglasses as part of a costume that he said represented a "black basketball player," according to the New Times.

"The main objective that I have is not to be recognizable," Mr. Hikind said in an interview. "Of course the intention was not to offend anyone. That's the last thing that I ever imagined that would happen, to be very honest. It never crossed my mind."

The Post further reported that Hikind had hundreds of guests to his home on Sunday, and as he said he had done in past years, he enlisted a professional makeup artist to help him with his costume. When his grown son, Yoni, asked him if he could post a photograph of the outfit on Facebook, Hikind said saw no problem with it.

But on Monday Hikind, who was quoted as saying, "there is not a prejudiced bone in my body," found himself at the center of an upheaval. He initially brushed off the commotion following The New York Observer's report on the matter, explaining in a blog that it was a product of "political correctness to the absurd."

(Source: New York Times)

Meeting Feb. 28 on Location of New Medical Center

Dimensions Healthcare System along with the University of Maryland Medical System, the state of Maryland, and Prince Georges County will hold a community meeting on Thursday Feb. 28 regarding possible locations for the new Regional Medical Center. The meeting takes place at 7 p.m. at the Prince Georges Sports & Learning Complex in Landover, Md.

The Regional Medical Center will be a state-of-the-art facility, which is being constructed as a part of a strategy to transform the county's healthcare system into an efficient, effective and financially viable healthcare delivery system, which will improve the health of residents of Prince Georges County and the Southern Maryland region.

To view the map of proposed locations, visit http://cms.princegeorgescountymd.gov/ExecutiveNews/Shared%20Documents/FourHospitalSites.pdf

Janet Jackson and billionaire businessman Wissam Al Mana announced on Monday that they have been officially married since last year. A statement posted on Jackson's website reads that:

"The rumours regarding an extravagant wedding are simply not true. Last year we were married in a quiet, private, and beautiful ceremony. Our wedding gifts to one another were contributions to our respective favourite children's charities. We would appreciate that our privacy is respected and that we are allowed this time for celebration and joy. With love, Wissam and Janet"

The singer said the couple tied the knot in a "quiet, private, and beautiful ceremony," not the over-the-top affair that gossip sites reported would take place. Jackson added that "rumors regarding an extravagant wedding are simply not true." There was speculation that Al Mana was planning to splash out millions on a lavish ceremony, even flying Jackson's large family to Qatar aboard private jets.

This is the third marriage number for Jackson, whose union with fellow singer James DeBarge was annulled in 1985. In 1991, she married dancer, songwriter and director Rene Elizondo Jr., but they kept their relationship a secret until their divorce in 2000.

(Source: Wire Reports)