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The Afro-American, September 22, 2012 - September 28, 2012
Food Stamp Use Soars to Record Level By AFRO Staff A record 46.7 million Americans are using food stamps as of June, the U. S. Department of Agriculture reported Sept. 4. The number reflects a doubling since 2003 in the number of people who receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), according to the USDA. The agency’s data about government food assistance emerged less than four days ahead of the release of Labor Department data about the nation’s payrolls. The 46.7 million users are in 22.4 million households in a program that the USDA spent $6.2 billion to support in June, roughly $10 billion less than USDA spent to support food stamps in December 2011. The rise in food stamp users is the latest peak in a fouryear trend of food stamp use that reflects aggressive efforts by the Obama administration to ensure food stamp program
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famed ancestors through their images. Continued from A1 There was the portrait of Douglass and there were photos of Washington. “My grandmother, Nettie Hancock Washington, Booker T. Washington’s granddaughter, lived on Massachusetts Avenue in Bethesda, and I spent a lot of time with her,” he said. “There were all types of pictures of him at her house, but I was much older when I really started to take a look at who he was.” The Douglass connection also was forged through time he spent at his great-great-greatgrandfather’s summer home in Highland Beach on the Chesapeake Bay. “From the front yard, you looked out at the Chesapeake Bay. Across the bay, you could see land on the other side. That land was the Eastern Shore, where [Frederick Douglass] was born,” Morris said. Born in Washington in 1962, Morris was the oldest of three children of Nettie Washington Douglass III and Kenneth B. Morris Sr., an insurance broker. Though he didn’t make an issue of it, people found it incredible when Morris told them he was related to the two famous men. He was called a liar more than once — by students and teachers. “As a child, when somebody doesn’t believe you, you stop talking about it,” he said. He was a good student and athlete and lettered in football and track in high school. After a few years at California State University at Fullerton, he left to travel the world. He also worked as a singer, performing and touring with the international music outreach group the Young Americans. Once he was the star singer and dancer in a performance with Liberace. He was just Kenny Morris, and he made no fuss about his heritage. “I just didn’t know that much about it,” he said. “I remember being in high school history classes and we’d get to chapters on Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, and I didn’t know exactly what they had done. I remember those chapters being very short.” It was his mother who taught him about his lineage. Frederick Douglass, she told him, was born a slave, escaped to freedom in the North
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participation by all who are eligible. The rise also reflects the state of the economy, according to Anne Sheridan, director of the Maryland No Kid Hungry campaign, who told the AFRO that the dimensions of food stamp use paint “a disturbing picture” of hunger in America. Her group provides free breakfasts to children in public school throughout Maryland. She said the rise in food stamp use is consistent with the numbers of students seeking free breakfasts. More than 350,000 of the state’s 865,000 public school students
and was still so hunted that he headed to Europe to remain free. He lobbied President Abraham Lincoln to allow blacks to fight in the Civil War. He wrote prolifically — his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is on almost every student reading list. He is considered one of the best orators in the history of the spoken word. Booker T. Washington, the “Wizard of Tuskegee,” also was born a slave but was freed at age 9 with the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation. He was a great champion of education and so impressive as a teacher and leader that he was tapped at age 25 to head the Alabama teaching college that would become Tuskegee University. He was the first African American to dine at the White House; another would not follow for 30 years. He drew fire from some other prominent blacks of his day for his stand that segregation was acceptable if blacks could excel in their own communities. His book, Up From Slavery, was a bestseller for decades and remains popular. His mother also told him about her parents, descendants of the two great men. Her father, Frederick Douglass III, a surgeon, had met her mother, Nettie Hancock Washington, walking across the campus at then-Tuskegee Institute one day in 1941. “It was love at first sight,” Nettie Washington Douglass III told Morris and his siblings. “They got married three months later.” They were happy, but his lineage always weighed heavily on Frederick Douglass III, Morris learned. His grandfather took his own life while his wife was pregnant with Morris’s mother. “People were always comparing him and asking what he was going to do,” Morris said. “He was a brilliant man, but he just couldn’t handle the weight of the expectations.” What happened to the father she never knew made Nettie Washington Douglass III cautious about her own children. She never compared them to their forefathers or led them to think she had expectations. Though she spoke at black history events and they accompanied her to openings and dedications of structures named for Douglass and Washington, his family was “pretty low key” about their lineage, Morris said.
passages from Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and Charlotte Forten’s “Emancipation Day,” accompanied by harmonica player Sais Kamalidiin and interpretative dancer Christen Williams. Woodard was visibly moved as Howard student and saxophonist Ashton Vines performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” “What was running through my mind (was) 350 years of history and history in terms of bodies and relatives and people,” she said. “ The history of souls, the history of watching those children stand here. Just the fact that we’re still here and we’re still coming
1965 where police officers in Selma, Ala., attacked nonviolent marchers in what later became known as Bloody Sunday. In 2011, he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The site of the speech was the spot where Lewis, in 1963, joined with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., several other civil rights leaders and millions of Americans for the historic March on Washington. Forty-nine years later, Lewis spoke from those same steps about the freedom struggle. “If someone said nothing has changed, I would say come and walk in my shoes and I will show you change,” he said.
the American family. We live in the same house, the American house, the world house.” Hundreds of people gathered to hear Lewis speak about the hard-fought battle from slavery to freedom. The event, dubbed The Celebrating Freedom event, was co-sponsored by Howard University and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The event held in conjunction with NEH’s Emancipation Nation commemoration of the 150th anniversary and coincided with Constitution Day, which mandates that on September 17th all federally funded educational institutions study the U.S. Constitution. The hour-long ceremony featured several speakers, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Oscar-nominated actress Alfre Woodard Photo by Rob Roberts and Dr. Wayne Frederick, Howard’s Actress Alfre Woodard, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, provost and CAO. Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities Jim Afro Blue, the Howard Leach, Provost and Chief Academic Officer Howard University University jazz choir, Wayne A. I. Frederick, U.S. Congressman John Lewis of Georgia stirred the crowd with and actor Tyree Young song. The program was presented in three “Almost 50 years ago I came sections: Longing for Freedom, on.” It was apropos that Lewis here and stood on those steps Emancipation and Being Free. gave the keynote address. He with Martin Luther King Jr. Woodard, who is known for has served in Congress since and others. Back then we had her roles in Miss Ever’s Boys 1987. He was active in the a dream, that dream is in the and Desperate Housewives, Civil Rights Movement in process of being realized. So is a long-time activist and the1960s and was one of the we must never, ever give up member of the President’s original 13 original Freedom on our march toward complete Committee on the Arts and Riders. He led the protest in freedom.” Humanities. She recited
qualify for free or reduced price meals, she said. Virginia de los Santos, principal of White Oak Middle School in Silver Spring, said the school has a breakfast cart near classrooms to offer a meal to any student who wants one. She’s pleased with the results. “The students are happy because they’re eating,” she said. “There’s no stigma, because a lot of them are doing it. Everywhere you look, students [are] eating. It’s not just the ones that pay or just the ones that get free lunch. They’re all mixed together.” Sheridan pointed out that food stamp use is not a sign of government dependence. “The food stamp program is part of the social safety net [for] the people who use it as a temporary stop gap,” she said.
Their lack of a place on the national stage, however, provided an opportunity for imposters to step in. At least twice a year, they are alerted that someone is committing fraud in Douglass’s name. A few years ago, he and his family were successful in exposing a Maryland man, Frederick I. Douglas Jr., who traveled the nation for 20 years performing as Frederick Douglass and pretending to be his great-great-grandson. “It was out-and-out fraud,” Morris said. “Both of these men are heroes and prominent, so a lot of people named their kids for them. You will have Frederick Douglass Joneses and Booker T. Washington Smiths. Some people just took advantage of that.” The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site at Douglass’s last home, Cedar Hill in Anacostia, holds the records of the orator’s descendants. After the births of his two daughters, Jenna, now 17, and Nicole, 14, Morris and his wife of 28 years, Diana, provided documentation to show the link. Morris had recently returned from a trip to Washington to attend a birthday celebration at Cedar Hill when a close friend, Robert Benz, showed him the magazine that changed his life. “It was a National Geographic and the cover story was called ‘21st Century Slaves,’ ” Morris said. “I looked at the headline and was shocked. I thought slavery had ended with the work of Frederick Douglass and the Emancipation Proclamation.” He started to do his own research and was deeply disturbed by what he found. Human beings were being bought and sold all over the world. Girls his daughters’ ages were being sexually exploited. “I was reading one night as Diana was putting the girls to bed. They were 12 and 9 at the time,” he said. “I heard them laughing . . . I went into the room, and I wasn’t able to look them in their eyes. I realized that I had this platform that my ancestors had built through struggle and through sacrifice. I knew I could stand up and do something about this crime.” Like Frederick Douglass, he would work to abolish slavery. Like Booker T. Washington, he would use education to forge a solution to a problem. Finally, the link was made that had eluded him
Alfred Street Baptist Continued from A1 invested.” A local historical connection about what’s at stake this November came from Moran who represents the Alfred Street Baptist Church community and other neighborhoods in Congress. Moran noted the historical significance of Alfred Street Baptist Church, which according to the church’s website, was the first Baptist church formed by colored people north of Richmond, Va. Moran also reflected,
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his entire life. ‘Agitate for change’ The last words of wisdom imparted by Douglass, according to many historical accounts, were “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!” Depending on who told the story, 77-year-old Douglass uttered the words on the day he died to a boy who asked advice on how he should live his life or to a group of suffragettes he addressed before returning to Cedar Hill and having a heart attack on Feb. 20, 1895. The words are considered Douglass’s rallying cry. In 2007, his great-great-great-grandson took up the challenge by co-founding the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation with Benz to “create awareness about modern-day slavery in an effort to expedite its demise.” Last week, the foundation, based in Atlanta, launched a national human-trafficking education program to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation called “100 Days to Freedom.” “The foundation has partnered with 10 schools across the country and the students have been asked to collaborate on creating a new proclamation of freedom addressing today’s slavery,” said Morris, who donates his time to the group. At the request of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the organization will also work with the New York City public schools this fall. The education program’s credo is “Abolition Through Education.” Its goal: “To agitate for change,” Morris said. As did Douglass and Washington. “I appreciate this ancestry now,” Morris said. “I wake up each day and pinch myself and wonder why I was chosen by God to have this incredible lineage. I feel blessed that I do because it allows me to do the work that I do. The blood of two of the greatest heroes of this country is running through my veins. I feel like my ancestors would be very proud and feel very connected to what we are doing. They guide me every day in what I do.” Reprinted with permission from the ‘Washington Post.’
“Alexandria used to be part of the District of Columbia. The people of Alexandria” took what was once Virginia land back from D.C. “over the issue of slavery.” The veteran congressman encouraged the audience to look for images of freed slaves kneeling, begging Alexandria whites not to vote to go back to Virginia. Moran’s plea was particularly felt by seniors like Margarette Peterson, a member of Alfred Street Church, whose vote is key for Democrats hoping to win Virginia for President Obama’s reelection campaign. Peterson says for her, the
blood that he had dropped after she Continued from A1 bit him during the attack. “That evidence was collected and submitted to our DNA lab and to our Combined DNA Index System,” said Captain Genia Reeves, assistant commander of the Prince George’s Police Department Criminal Investigations Division. For months police waited to see if the crime would be solved through DNA. Then, last month, a match came back identifying the suspect as Rodney William Blanton, 56. He was arrested at his home in the 3900 block of Suitland Road in Suitland. “Once we get a notice that it is a confirmation with the suspect, we in turn have to re-confirm before we will actually obtain an arrest warrant for the person,” Reeves said. “It’s not uncommon that it’s a long process, but it’s a detailed process so that we can ensure that the right person has been arrested.” The investigation was a victory for Prince George’s police in more ways than one. They
central issue is Medicare. “We have used it [Medicare]… so we have been very, very pleased to see that this president is willing to take care of all of us.” In response to Republican advertisements that claim that Medicare was cut by the president to pay for his Affordable Care Act, Peterson does not buy it. “We listen very carefully,” said Peterson of her and fellow seniors. As a result, Peterson predicts that like four years ago, seniors, African Americans, and other key constituents for Democrats in Virginia will come out in record numbers.
had been eager to solve the case. But they had also been eager to increase their use of forensic technology in solving crimes in the county, according to Assistant Chief of Police Kevin Davis. Davis said the department was pushing away from the traditional staple of crime solving—confession-based investigations and officials had created the department’s Bureau of Forensic Science and Intelligence to oversee investigations using new crime-fighting technology. “We need to prosecute people with better and more forensic evidence,” Davis told the AFRO. “A confession is certainly one thing, but we want the DNA, we want the hair, fiber. We want the fingerprints and we want all the other things that go into making a prosecution a good one and a successful one.” Blanton was charged with first and fourth degree burglary, robbery , theft and first- and second-degree assault. He is currently being held without bond at the Prince George’s County jail. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Oct. 1.