Sharpton and Thurmond

I got a kick out of the recent news that Al Sharpton and Strom Thurmond have a common past…Ancestry.com is a legitimate source for tracing one’s history. I know first hand. Ancestry.com helped me piece together parts of my slave past. which I was able to share with my siblings and my mother before she passed away last year. In short my great grandmother on my mother’s side, Millie, was a “Buckner”. Grandma Millie was born in 1870 in Pembroke Kentucky to Joe and Millie, former slaves on the Buckner plantation. Slaves in Kentucky were not freed by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. That act applied only to slaves in Confederate states. Kentucky, a border state, never left the Union and therefore needed its own proclamation before Joe and Millie and their parents on the Buckner plantation could be set free. Once free Joe and Millie Buckner had nowhere to go so they remained on the massive farm in slave quarters and worked as cheap labor. Millie was born free; but by age ten she had already been farmed out and living in the home of a well do white man. The census listed her as a nurse maid. I recall Grandma Millie never talked about her past or her parents. I figured she never really knew them. From my Mom I knew that Millie had a tough life; that her husband Jim Bell was killed in or near Pembroke and Millie came to Louisville, my hometown alone with her children including Ivory, the youngest of the Buckner’s...my Mother’s Mom.

What Works

I don’t know who in the DC school system killed vocational education years ago but a lot of good people are now trying to bring back Carpentry, Electrical work, air conditioning and heating repair classes. Next week the $1.2 million renovation work at Cardozo high for a Construction trades program will be unveiled. Sixty students will move into the new wing of the otherwise dilapidated school building. The construction industry was the driving force behind the move, but someone in the school system had to be convinced that re-starting vocational-ed was worth the cost. A lot of students are dropping out or not going on to college. John McMahon, Chairman of Miller and Long construction says every student currently enrolled in Cardozo’s construction academy will be given a job. Now if school officials can just follow through with plans to re-open Phelps Vocational school in Northeast.

DC Mayor Fenty is expected to go along with DC Council members who want to authorize a new higher tax on Verizon Center tickets so that Wizards owner Abe Pollin can make renovations inside the building. Fenty, like the legislators, feels the city owes Pollin because he used his own private financing to build the arena which, along with the Gallery place metro stop, helped spur incredible economic development in the Chinatown area. City leaders will get one of the Verizon Center skysuites to use as they please as part of the bill introduced in the Council this week. We’ll be watching to see who shows up for the games.

Illegal Parking and other matters

Guilty! DC Councilman Jack Evans called me to admit it was HIS car that Nine News Now videotaped this past Saturday night parked illegally in a cross walk, blocking a handicapped ramp at 7^th and F streets across from the Verizon Center. Our cameraman spotted the infraction and couldn’t help but notice the “Ward Two” DC Council tags on the front and back of the black convertible. I aired the video on the Saturday night newscast with an intro that said “We don’t know if Ward Two Councilman Jack Evans had an emergency or just couldn’t find a legal parking space”. Councilman Evans called the newsroom and admitted he was wrong. “I had been to a shooting in the ward and was rushing to tie up some family matters and arrived late having already missed the first quarter (Wizards-Lakers). The Councilman ended with the dumbest thing in all this is “that I parked the car right in front of your live truck”.

 

DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier has brought back the “Officer Friendly” program to the city’s elementary schools. For those who haven’t been around for many years, Officer Friendly was the cop in your school who helped straightened out the bully. He gave DC Police a “Friendly face”. Now if the Chief can just get the Officer Friendly “Side by Side” band started up again.

 

DC Mayor Adrian Fenty says in coming weeks the administration will unveil “peer mentors” in the junior high and high schools to help curb some of the violent behavior. If it’s anything like the great program that former Redskins Brig Owens started in city and suburban high schools, the team leaders will be selected from a cross section of students; scholars, athletes, average Joes and some border line cases. The peer counselor numbers will be so great that changing the norm for acceptable behavior in these schools will happen sooner rather than later without serious confrontation.