Today, Harlem Representative Adriano Espaillat issued the following statement touting successful efforts of the Biden-Harris Administration to lower prescription prices. This will happen for the first ten drugs that have been negotiated by Medicare. “Once again, Democrats have delivered because we firmly believe that no one should ever have to choose between putting food on the table…
Today, Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman, head of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and the voice in President Biden’s Cabinet for America’s more than 34 million small businesses, announced a new memorandum. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the SBA and the Republic of India’s Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to strengthen the two countries’ joint…
Today, New York City Department of Small Business Services (SBS) Acting Commissioner Dynishal Gross marked Black Business Month. This was done by celebrating milestones in Black entrepreneurship and labor force participation in New York City and announced a new partnership between SBS and LinkNYC to provide Black-owned businesses with free marketing and promotion through the…
In today’s fast-paced world, homeowners are constantly seeking ways to enhance the comfort, aesthetics, and value of their homes. Whether you’re preparing to sell or simply wish to enjoy a refreshed living space, understanding professional construction tips can make the process smoother and more efficient. This guide delves into expert strategies that can help you…
Dr. Ashwin Vasan is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, stated that. “For the second time in just over two years, the World Health Organization has declared mpox a global health emergency. This action was necessary, and as the Health Commissioner of New York City – which was…
The Helen Keller International’s New York Vision Program (NYVP) will conduct free eye examinations for families with children at events on Friday, Aug. 16, at the Abe Stark Older Adult Center @ Millennium Development (10315 Farragut Road), and on Friday, August 30th with City Councilmember Crystal Hudson’s Back to School Event at Jackie Robinson School, 46 Mckeever Place, between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.—both in Brooklyn.
The events are part of the NYVP’s efforts to make eye health care available for more New York City residents, particularly those who normally forego vision tests because they can’t afford them.
In an emailed Q&A with the AmNews, Melinda Birks, the program operations officer for Helen Keller International’s U.S. Vision Program, and her team explained how their free vision screenings, eye exams, eyeglasses, and referral program works.
AmNews: What will the vision screening entail?
Melinda Birks: Helen Keller International partners with communities that are striving to overcome longstanding cycles of poverty. By delivering the essential building blocks of good health, sound nutrition, and clear vision, we help millions of people create lasting change in their own lives. Helen Keller’s U.S. Vision team helps eliminate the primary barriers to vision care for vulnerable children and adults: access and expense. Since the program’s start in Washington Heights in 1994, it has expanded to several states across the country where the need is highest. Last year alone, Helen Keller screened nearly 114,000 individuals, of [whom] 67% needed and were provided with no-cost prescription glasses.
AmNews: Why would—or should—anyone who hasn’t been screened in the last year or more do a vision screening?
Birks: As many as 4 million children and 12 million adults in the United States suffer from impaired vision due to uncorrected refractive error. Combining refractive error––nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism––with more serious eye disorders such as amblyopia (lazy eye) and strabismus (eye turn), vision loss is the single most prevalent disabling condition in the United States. Left untreated, vision impairments can affect a person’s social life and relationships, a child’s academic future, an adult’s ability to provide for their family.
AmNews: Are there individuals who are scared of vision tests? Are there good reasons to be
scared of vision tests?
Birks: Helen Keller’s vision model is simple, flexible, and cost-effective. Services are on site at no cost to the children or adults. Participants are first screened by Helen Keller’s vision team
using the Snellen eye chart. Those who fail the screening—typically about a quarter of
participants—receive a refractive error assessment from a licensed optometrist. If the person
needs glasses, they are able to choose from a variety of frame styles. Their stylish,
tailor-made prescription glasses are provided to the participant, at the same site, within three
to four weeks, all free of charge.
A small percentage of individuals may have symptoms of a more complicated eye condition and are then referred to a local eye care provider partner for a full eye examination.
AmNews: Do you know what percentage of New Yorkers don’t regularly get their eyes checked? Why is it important to do so?
Birks: Nearly two out of three adults in the U.S. report having vision problems. Although refractive error is easily addressed with a pair of prescription eyeglasses, many families in New York City –where as many as one in five people live in poverty –cannot afford or easily access an eye exam or a pair of prescription eyeglasses. Barriers to access for this essential care include cost, insurance, transportation, and long wait times at local clinics. In an informal survey
conducted by Helen Keller Int’l with low-income clients nationwide, nearly two in three reported that they could not access an annual visit to the optometrist.
AmNews: Who are you looking to screen? What age groups? Why?
Birks: Helen Keller’s vision team meets children and vulnerable adults where they are––in schools, community-based service programs, homeless shelters, and public housing. By providing services on site, at no cost to the individual, we can help alleviate stresses like transportation, cost, insurance, and time to find and visit a doctor.
When the first slave market in Europe, known as Mercado de Escravos, was established in Portugal in the town of Lagos between 1441 and 1444, and with it the commencement of the importing of slaves from West Africa, the world was forever changed. The colonization of Africa by European countries later followed.
Centuries before the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 formalized European colonization of Africa, the seizing of land and vast human and natural resources had begun. Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria and the most populated city in sub-Subharan Africa, is the namesake of Portugal’s Lagos.
The indelible imprint of colonialism and its unmistakably lasting remnants, and polarizing modern day immigration were optically apparent on the soccer pitches, basketball courts, track stadium and everywhere else sporting events were held at Paris Olympics, which concluded on Sunday. Several European teams, among them France’s men’s soccer and basketball contingents, were predominated by athletes of African descent. Both won silver medals in their respective sports.
The soccer team, coached by Thierry Henry, one of the greatest strikers of all-time, a Black man, whose mother is from Martinique and father from Guadeloupe, lost in the finals 5-3 to Spain in extra-time. The basketball team fell to the U.S. in the gold medal game 98-87.
Emmanouil Karalis, who took bronze in the pole vault representing Greece, is Ugandan on his mother’s side. NBA superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo, who led the Greek squad to the medal round, was born in Athens but his parents immigrated to Greece from Nigeria.
The United Kingdom’s top male and female sprinters, Zharnel Hughes and Dina Asher-Smith, are both Black. Smith is a three-time Olympic medalist, including winning a silver in Paris in the women’s 4×100 meter relay as the UK finished second to the U.S. Meanwhile, Hughes helped the U.K. men’s team earn a bronze in the 4×100.
The presence of African descendants in the Olympics traces to Constantin Henriquez, considered to be the first known Black athlete to compete in the Olympics and first Black gold medal winner, both achieved at the Paris Olympics in 1900 representing France in rugby.
Born in Haiti in the late 1800s, the exact date is unknown but estimated to be around 1877. Henriquez’s father, a Haitian politician, sent him to France in 1893 to study medicine. Soon after his arrival, Henriquez began playing rugby and excelled at the sport.
It has been well documented that athletes of African descent are subjected to racial slurs and even physical assault playing in professional sports leagues in Europe. Yet their ancestral lineage, resulting from millions brought forcibly and millions voluntarily seeking improved economic opportunities, has reset the course of the past, present and future.
Kyia Williams moved from Baltimore to New York City in July 2014. “I just needed something different,” she said. “I needed a fresh perspective. Baltimore, my hometown, is lovely but it’s very slow, and I wanted to be able to put myself out there and see what would stick. I felt like there was no other place to do that other than New York.”
Williams first began her New York sojourn working as a teacher. She assisted other educators at places like the Montessori Educational Play Space and at the Brooklyn-based Little Sun People Childcare Daycare center in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Those were interesting gigs, but ultimately Williams progressed toward her calling. Since childhood, she’s loved cooking. Her grandmother, Alice Holland, taught her how to cook and by age nine, Williams was preparing dishes with her—pot roasts, pound cakes, fried fish, fried potatoes, oxtail soup, roasted cabbage, fried cabbage, steamed cabbage, collard greens, pig’s feet, black-eyed peas, potato salad.
Her grandmother taught Williams how to cook the kind of food that satisfied the community the family grew up in. Her family lived in the historically Black Baltimore neighborhood of Turner Station, an area that had been created just after the Civil War and one of the few places in Baltimore where African Americans could build and live in homes without facing discrimination. It was where all the musicians and politicians would come to eat, relax, and take part in local Black culture, and, incidentally, where Henrietta Lacks – whose cancer cells were stolen by John Hopkins University doctors and formed into scientifically important HeLa cells – once lived. From 2007 to around 2010, Williams attended culinary school at the now-defunct Baltimore International College, but she did not walk away with her degree. “I didn’t finish. I ended up helping my mom take care of my grandmother,” she explained. Her extended family still resides in Turner Station, but Williams, her sister, mother, and their half-brother moved out of state.
Once Williams moved to New York, she was able to start cooking professionally. “I knew my passion was cooking, but New York was such a different space for me,” she said. “It’s so fast. And there were so many people [and] there were all these things. I was like, I don’t even know if I’m going to be good at this; it seems like there’s a lot you have to put in. But I had a lot of support in the community.”
Williams set up her company, Wildflower Kitchen, and became a personal chef and culinary consultant. Through advertising assistance from her sister, Khalilah Beavers, and word-of-mouth among those she has worked with, she began getting jobs advising local restaurants about the best practices for managing their businesses. “Most times they’re already doing well. But some businesses, they’re just starting out. One business I’m currently working with, they’re doing well, but they’re expanding. I think they’re looking for a team of individuals who can help with their special services and special events.”
As a personal chef, Williams has catered private events for the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Richard Beavers Gallery, Third Crown Jewelry, and the Farragut Stakeholders Group. She’s cooked for contemporary recording artists, visual artists, even celebrities like former NBA player Carmelo Anthony, the photographer Brittani Sensabaugh, NYC Council Member Chi Ossé, and the celebrated fashion stylist Mobolaji Dawodu.
Williams is currently developing a new updated website, KyiaW.com, so that restaurant spaces and cafes that need consultation and individuals who want to contact her for dining and catering experiences can do so.
“That’s really where I come in, especially when it comes to reading menus, giving advice, and trying to figure out a better system—or just an easier system so that everybody can follow it,” she said.
Herbalist Amanda David bet the farm on Rootwork Herbals in 2021 after achieving a lifelong dream of buying her own plot of land and sharing it with others. From the dirt grew the Jane Minor BIPOC Community Garden, a sanctuary for Black, Brown, and queer people to tend and harvest their own crops. Goats and chickens call the property home, as do David and her three children.
But now, just a few years later, friends are fundraising to relocate the New York native, who is Black, from her Tompkins County homestead due to continued alleged threats and racial harassment by her neighbor, who is white.
“I have been working hard for many years, never able to afford a home,” David said in a virtual call with the AmNews in June. “I was finally able to afford a home and as soon as I purchased it, I wanted this to be a place where Black and Brown folks can have access to this little piece of nature, [for it] to be a sanctuary, a place where people can build community and reconnect to the land and all of those beautiful healing things that have been systematically taken away from us.
“To then almost immediately be subjected to this kind of racial harassment—the exact thing that I was trying to create safety around is now happening daily to us. Despite that, we have built a beautiful community. We have classes and events that really bring people together [who] are really healing and it’s gotten to the point where it doesn’t feel safe to do that anymore.”
In 2020, David and her children moved to Brooktondale, a small town outside of Ithaca, initially renting the property. Early on, the neighbor’s alleged racist remarks to David were directed toward the previous owner, who was Asian American. She purchased the home a year later, which is when the neighbor, named as Robert Whittaker in a lawsuit filed in June by the herbalist, “began making racially and/or sexually derogatory remarks” toward her.
The filing alleges he called David and her children anti-Black slurs and remarks, some of which were captured on video and obtained by the AmNews. When she built a fence on the property line in response, Whittaker’s harassment persisted. He allegedly threatened to beat her son with a stick while referring to him with the N-word in one instance. Another incident in the lawsuit filing alleged Whittaker fired a gun from his porch when David hosted an event for Black teens. All the while, he allegedly continued to tamper with the fence she installed.
Amanda David on her property (Courtesy of Amanda David)
The Tompkins County Sheriff’s Department arrested and charged Whittaker multiple times throughout the past three overs due to harassment against David, which led to two guilty pleas. She said multiple orders of protection, temporary and permanent, have not prevented him from engaging with her, and that he even referred to her by the N-word and an anti-gay slur to an officer, who noted the interaction on the arrest report. In February, a judge mandated that Whittaker surrender his firearms—both guns and pellet guns—but they have since been returned, according to David.
While Whittaker faces both civil and criminal actions, David’s options remain limited. Sally Santangelo, executive director of CNY Fair Housing, which represents David, said most injunctive relief obtained by the organization in past harassment cases comes from landlord-tenant disputes rather than neighbor versus neighbor.
“It’s possible that the monetary damages could be significant enough to force him to sell his property or allow her to move, or the threat of that might be enough,” Santangelo said. “Even if a court couldn’t act directly to force him to sell his property, it’s possible that it could happen as a result of monetary damages.”
While David weighed her options the first time she spoke to the AmNews in June, she now believes moving would be the safest option.
Mutual aid efforts defending David sprang up following the harassment, with a Signal group formed by sympathetic fellow farmers and herbalists. Some are in her immediate vicinity while others offer broader support from a distance. One member, Erica Frenay, said Whittaker seems to behave more pleasantly when white people like her are present.
“We’ve tried to step in to do things, like put up the security cameras along that border, that she really doesn’t feel comfortable going to,” Frenay said. “The batteries in those cameras seem to die frequently and so we replace the batteries whenever that’s needed. Some people in the network have helped take care of her animals when she doesn’t feel comfortable going outside to take care of the goats and the chickens.
“We’ve also done other things that are not physical support, but more mental [and] emotional, because this history was going on for a while before the Signal rapid response group started. We’ve helped her to organize a spreadsheet and folder of documentation so whenever she has filed a police report or talked to a lawyer or the D.A., we try to document all of that.”
Her town, which is included in the township of Caroline, is overwhelmingly white—more than 85%, according to the 2020 Census. Just 2.2% of the population is Black. With Rootwork Herbals’ potential relocation, the local community stands to lose a significant resource.
“This [is] not just straight-up farming, but Amanda has a whole medicine school where her students can go up there and directly understand how to create herbal medicines that have been ancestral and passed down,” said Onyx Ramírez, senior communications manager for the Black Farmer Fund. “She has the garden beds, which are accessible for people in the community to be able to grow their own stuff. And beyond that, Amanda hosts so many healing community events…it’s been withheld for the purpose of keeping people safe.”
Whittaker’s lawyer did not respond to AmNews’ requests for comment by press time. Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visitinghttps://bit.ly/amnews1.
Harlem Week held its Senior Citizens Day at the State Office Building on Friday while celebrating its 50th anniversary. Throughout the day, longtime Harlem Week attendees gathered for the annual event designed to celebrate and provide information to seniors.
“Harlem Week continues to be something that we all look forward to each and every summer,” Adleasia Lonesome-Gomez, 63, told the AmNews.
Lonesome-Gomez has been coming to Harlem Week since she was a child, and has fond memories of listening to Jazz at Grant National Memorial. Now as an attendee of seniors’ day, she says she loves the community coming together to celebrate Harlem, while continuing to pass down Harlem Week tradition to her children as well.
“Hopefully when I’m no longer here, it’ll be another 100 years, another 150—something that we need to keep going for generations,” Lonesome-Gomez said.
As they walked in, attendees learned about various service programs available to them from groups like Black Health Matters and Visiting Nurse Services, and screened for blood pressure and vision from the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine.
The first half of the day featured the premiere screening of “The First,” a film about Welsey Augustus Williams, the first Black firefighter to be promoted to an officer for the New York Fire Department. First Deputy Fire Commissioner Joseph W. Pfeifer and Assistant Fire Commissioner Jim Harding also presented a poster of the film in celebration of Harlem Week.
Voza Rivers, Harlem Week Board member and one of the original founders along with Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce CEO Lloyd Williams, spoke about the significance of Senior Citizens Day.
“This is one of the most important activities that we do because it is on the backs of the seniors who created the foundation that takes us into the future,” Rivers said.
E. Ronald Guy, 79, is the chair of Ryan Health and remembers Harlem Day in 1974. As Guy was a member of the Harlem Youth (Haryou) organization in 1964, a community organization that worked to uplift Harlem residents in education and civic engagement, he is delighted to see how Harlem Week has grown over the last five decades and carried on that critical work.
“It has elevated our sense of community and commitment,” Guy said. “On a personal level, It made me want to be more engaged.”
Guy emphasized the importance of building connections between older and younger generations of Harlem.
“The two things we have to remember are the seniors who got us where we are and the young people to get us further,” Guy said. “We need to make sure that we connect the seniors and the young people together.”
New York State Senator Cordell Cleare, who represents District 30 (which includes Harlem), made an appearance to share information about benefits and recent legislation with seniors. Other speakers provided voter registration and banking information while trainers from NY Road Runners also led an energetic workout session.
Stephanie Francis, 75, is an original Harlem Week Board Member who also helped develop the first Harlem Day. She likes reflecting on her support of seniors in the early days of Harlem Week to now being a “super senior,” herself.
Francis says that when Harlem Day and eventually Harlem Week was developed, it was built on the focus of supporting small businesses and vendors and bringing the community together as Harlem had been struggling in the early 1970’s financially.
“We got together – Lloyd (Williams), Marvin Kelly, Anthony Rodgers, Grace Williams,” Francis shared. “Names that you may not hear as much because some of them have transitioned but the thing that’s most important, we stood together.”
Francis is proud of how Harlem Week and its leadership continues to pass through the multiple generations of its leaders like her grandson, Taj.
“It’s not going to live if it doesn’t live,” Francis said. “Hopefully more people will come and support because the love is there, the energy is there.”
