Prince Georges Afro-American Newspaper March 8 2014

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PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY EDITION

Volume 122 No. 31

DON’T FORGET! Move Clocks Forward Sunday

MARCH 8, 2014 - MARCH 14, 2014

Prince George’s Lupita Nyong’o Scoops Oscar Win Male Educators Convene Summit By Courtney Jacobs AFRO Staff Writer On a frigid Saturday morning recently in Prince George’s County there was a gathering of a rare species in public schools: Male teachers. And while there were less than 100 people in Charles Herbert Flowers High School’s cavernous auditorium in Springdale, the meeting --dubbed The First Annual Male Educator Summit: Envisioning the Future of Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) -- marked a start. Among the participants of the fledgling enterprise was PGCPS Teacher of the year Albert Lewis. “We need to be solution oriented,” Lewis told the group of male teachers and administrators. “Let’s not just address the problems today, let’s also address the solutions.” Lewis is among the most rare of public educators, a Black male teacher. For many of the attendees, the summit was a chance to continue the conversation launched early in President Obama’s first term by Education Secretary Arne Duncan who has been calling for more Black male teachers. “Black men are largely underrepresented in our nation’s classrooms; it has been widely reported that they make up less than 2 percent of our country’s teachers,” Donald Nicolas, a 5th grade teacher at a public school in Broward County, Fla., wrote recently in Education Week. One of the African American teachers who took part in the meeting noted that one of the major barriers to adding more Blacks to their ranks is low pay. “You are going to work your butt off regardless of how much money you make, but if you go into it with knowing that at least you make a decent wage to have a wife and have some kids, it makes the payoff much more feasible and the Attack on D.C. payoff greater for you in the end,” Ronnie Seneque, who Postal Carrier teaches fifth grade math and Prompts $50K science at Barack Obama Reward Elementary, told the AFRO. His view was echoed by Barack Obama Elementary Black Kenmoor sixth grade math and science Middle Schoolers teacher Harold McCray. “I think the biggest thing View Past Through we need to do first is look at 1963 Birmingham Continued on A6

Voter registration deadline June 3 INSIDE A3

A6

Bombing

House Rejects O’Malley’s Effort to Tie Minimum Wage to Inflation By Zachary Lester AFRO Staff Writer

AP Photo

At the 86th Academy Awards, Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the 19th-century drama “12 Years a Slave.” The 31-year-old is the the first person from Africa to receive an Academy Award.

Ben Jealous Announces Next Move — From NNPA to NAACP to Silicon Valley

The Maryland House of Delegates March 5 voted down a plan by Gov. Martin O’Malley to tie increases in the minimum wage to inflation. O’Malley had hoped to connect the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index. Instead, Del. Heather Mizeur (D-Montgomery County),

By Hazel Trice Edney TriceEdneyWire.com

Benjamin Todd Jealous, the former NAACP president who has weaved a career through politics, the Black press and civil rights, has now announced his next move in pursuit of racial equality and economic justice. Jealous and the Oakland, Calif.-based Kapor Center for Social Impact, located in the Silicon Valley, announced this week that he has joined the center as its first venture partner. The center’s co-founders and cochairs, Mitchell Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, are bringing Jealous on to find techsavvy entrepreneurs and inventors with ideas for using technology for social impact. Jealous will assist the entrepreneurs, help them shape their tech visions and establish the selection criteria for possible seed money. He will also help lead the center’s effort to make investments in non-profit organizations and will join the board of the Kapor Center-funded Level Playing Field Institute, a non-profit AP File Photo dedicated to breaking down racial barriers in science, technology, engineering and math. “I’ve always been interested in technology. Benjamin Todd Jealous has now announced I’ve always been interested in [deepening] his next move in pursuit of racial equality and economic justice. Continued on A6

Maryland NAACP President Gerald Stansbury speaks at a recent minimum wage hearing in Annapolis. a candidate for governor, tried for an increase in the minimum wage of about 2 percent per year. But members of the House stood strongly against Mizeur’s measure, voting 124-8 to defeat it. Del. Aisha Braveboy (D-Prince George’s), chair of the Maryland Black Legislative Caucus and the bill’s sponsor in the Continued on A3

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World Bank Continues Systemic Discrimination By Maria Adebola and Talibah Chikwendu Special to the AFRO Yona Biru came to the United States after the military government takeover in Ethiopia resulted in a communist government. “I came to the U.S. with $12 in my pocket, including a $2 bill because I was told that was good luck,” Biru said. He worked hard, financing his education by working as a waiter. With his doctorate degree in economics in hand, he started working at the World Bank in 1993. For 17 years, he provided stellar service to the organization, spending seven of those years as the deputy global manager of the International Comparison Program (ICP), “one of the most prominent programs that the bank has ever managed,” he said. On Feb. 20, Biru told a group of civil rights leaders from local chapters in the Washington, Maryland and Virginia areas, that despite his hard work and success, he was not promoted because he is Black. His description of the working environment at the World Bank can be characterized as “Jim Crow” or “apartheid.” It is why the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), D.C. and Prince George’s County chapters; the National Action Network (NAN), D.C. chapter; National Urban League; and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition gathered to hear about and discuss the World Bank and these issues. “We are coming together as a group of local civil rights leaders representing organizations to say that we will Continued on A4

Moorehead Keeps ‘Moving on Up’ First African American to Open a Rolls Royce Dealership By Zenitha Prince AFRO Senior Correspondent The world of Rolls Royce dealerships is a rarefied one – only 38 exist in North America and 121 in the entire world. Thomas Moorehead joined that exclusive fraternity last December when he opened his franchise in Virginia, becoming the first African American to do so. “It took a lot of hard work,” said the 69-year-old entrepreneur of the accomplishment and his other thriving Continued on A4

Copyright © 2014 by the Afro-American Company


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