Thursday, most of us will gather together around tables in homes to share Thanksgiving dinner. I have often been struck by the fact that when I gather with my immediate family in Chicago or my extended family in New Orleans, the tables where we break bread are in homes situated in majority Black, if not all Black inner city neighborhoods.
City Council has withdrawn the Confederate monument legislation and may never take it up again — an act of cowardice that took place last week in an open forum where no one seemed the least bit dismayed or even ashamed. As it happened, I wondered, What are we teaching our children? Recently, on First Coast Connect with Melissa Ross, my
I wanted to write a response to the recent stories about housing: one in this newsletter on the plan to plug Jacksonville’s “missing middle” in the housing crisis with townhomes, as well as a Times-Union piece on the decline of the Black population in historically majority-Black neighborhoods. Reading those stories triggered an annoyance in my spirit I tried to ignore.
By next week, vaccines could be available locally for children ages 5 to 11 and the long pandemic nightmare we’ve been living might finally come to an end. I can’t wait to get my 6-year-old vaccinated. He’s looking forward to it too. He’s been wearing a mask for nearly two years. Even when friends, neighbors, and strangers have refused to
My son is 6,
He likes to run,
I encourage him to go the distance
Jury selection is underway in the murder trial of the three men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Georgia, about an hour’s drive north of Jacksonville. The murder trial quite possibly would never have happened if the video of Arbery being stalked, cornered, and gunned down by racist vigilantes while on an afternoon run had not been leaked and released.
“I’m never living in the South again.” This is what my mother says to me often. A New Orleans native who fled the muggy bayou for Chicago at the tail end of The Great Migration in 1970 has no desire to return to the soil that birthed her. Neither to live in New Orleans or to move permanently to Florida