Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Crown Heights”
For those of us who were born to farm but, alas, not born on a farm, the ache to have your own land can be so intense you feel it in your belly. I thought it could never happen for me. But now, after 20 years of farming and 15 years of interviewing farmers, I’m pretty sure that almost anyone …
In the 1980s and ‘90s I witnessed, and in “The Closest of Strangers” I condemned, some of the most counterproductive black American urban protests since the riots of the 1960s. Public paroxysms associated with names such as Bernhard Goetz, Howard Beach, Tawana Brawley, Rodney King, Crown Heights and O.J. Simpson were psychodramas staged to demand “justice” through lies, vilification of …
After the Labor Day Carnival, Life for U.S. Caribbeans Is No Party
Four days from now, on Labor Day, a 3-mile stretch of Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y., will be the venue for one of the nation’s largest public parades, and certainly the largest and oldest event celebrating Caribbean culture.
Known officially as the West Indian American Carnival Parade, the Pan-Caribbean festival, now in its 48th year, has been known to attract upwards of 2 million people, the vast majority of them reconnecting with a way of life they knew back home.
But after the revelry, lavish costumes, “home food” and the “jump up,” what’s the state of affairs with Caribbean people in the United States?
Our guest, Dr. Waldaba Stewart, sheds light on the issue. Dr. Stewart for more than 25 years has been a capacity building specialist and political action organizer for disadvantaged groups and communities in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Diaspora. A former state senator, he currently is chairman of the Caribbean Resource Center at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, and is widely recognized as the foremost African American expert on immigration policy reform.
“The inhabitants are pushed aside to make way for transplants who may come from the suburbs, another state or even from another country.” There is no city in this country where black people are safe from the current method of displacement known as gentrification. Washington, DC, once had a majority black population and was known as Chocolate City. Perhaps it …
