Sunday, April 15thfrom 1:00PM-3:00PM,  Tour Inside Highbridge Tower, West 174th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Join the Urban Park Rangers on a tour inside the iconic Highbridge Water Tower to learn about the history of New York City’s water supply and enjoy the panoramic views from the top of the 200 foot tower.Free and open to the public with no registration required! Arrive between 1:00PM and 2:45PM, to gain admittance.  Get more details and also register in advance on the NYC Parks site: LINK

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has for more than two decades accepted luxury trips nearly every year from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow without reporting them on financial disclosure forms, ProPublica reports.

In a lengthy story published Thursday the nonprofit investigative journalism organization catalogs various trips Thomas has taken aboard Crow’s yacht and private jet as well as to Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. A 2019 trip to Indonesia the story detailed could have cost more than $500,000 had Thomas chartered the plane and yacht himself, ProPublica reported.

Supreme Court justices, like other federal judges, are required to file an annual financial disclosure report which asks them to list gifts they have received. It was not clear why Thomas omitted the trips, but under a judiciary policy guide consulted by The Associated Press, food, lodging or entertainment received as “personal hospitality of any individual” does not need to be reported if it is at the personal residence of that individual or their family. That said, the exception to reporting is not supposed to cover “transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation” and properties owned by an entity.

A Supreme Court spokeswoman acknowledged an email from the AP seeking comment from Thomas but did not provide any additional information. ProPublica wrote that Thomas did not respond to a detailed list of questions from the organization.

Last month, the federal judiciary beefed up disclosure requirements for all judges, including the high court justices, although overnight stays at personal vacation homes owned by friends remain exempt from disclosure.

Last year, questions about Thomas’ ethics arose when it was disclosed that he did not step away from election cases following the 2020 election despite the fact that his wife, conservative activist Virginia Thomas, reached out to lawmakers and the White House to urge defiance of the election results. The latest story will likely increase calls for the justices to adopt an ethics code and enhance disclosure of travel and other gifts.

In a statement, Crow told ProPublica that he and his wife have been friends of Thomas and his wife since 1996, five years after Thomas joined the high court. Crow said that the “hospitality we have extended to the Thomas’s over the years is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends” and that the couple “never asked for any of this hospitality.”

He said they have “never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue.”

ProPublica’s story says that Thomas has been vacationing at Crow’s lavish Topridge resort virtually every summer for more than two decades. During one trip in 2017, other guests included executives at “Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major Republican donors and one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank,” ProPublica reported.

Crow wrote that he is “unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that.”

The disclosure of the lavish trips stands in contrast to what Thomas has said about his preferred methods of travel. Thomas, who grew up poor in Georgia, has talked about enjoying traveling in his motorcoach and preferring “Walmart parking lots to the beaches.”

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Three men whose graves were found at the original site of one of the nation’s oldest Black churches were members of its congregation in the early 19th century, a team of archaeologists and scientists in Virginia announced Thursday.

The First Baptist Church was formed in 1776 by free and enslaved Black people in Williamsburg, Virginia’s colonial capital. Members initially gathered in fields and under trees in defiance of laws that prevented African Americans from congregating.

The church’s original brick foundation was uncovered in 2021 by archaeologists at Colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum that now owns the land. The excavation of graves began last year in partnership with First Baptist’s descendant community.

More than 60 burial plots have been identified. Thursday’s announcement confirmed what oral histories had long told — that previous generations were buried on the land before it was paved over in the 20th century.

“Now we know they’re ours — they’re ours,” church member Connie Matthews Harshaw said Thursday. “Those people under that soil are of African descent. We go from there.”

Three sets of remains were chosen for examination. They underwent DNA testing, bone analysis and the evaluation of archaeological evidence that was found, including 19th century coffin nails. The wood from the hexagonal coffins is long gone.

Only one set of remains could provide adequate DNA, which can indicate race, said Raquel Fleskes, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Connecticut who conducted the analysis.

Those remains belonged to a Black man between the ages of 16 and 18 who stood 5 feet, 4 inches tall. His grave contained a clothing button that was made from animal bone and still carried some cotton fiber, said Jack Gary, Colonial Williamsburg’s director of archaeology.

The young man’s grave appeared to be marked by an upside-down, empty wine bottle. His coffin was likely moved from a previous location based on the large number of nails — possibly used to reinforce the coffin — and the jumbled way his bones came to rest.

The young man’s teeth indicated some kind of stress, which could have been malnutrition or disease, said Joseph Jones, a research associate with William & Mary’s Institute for Historical Biology.

“Childhood health is a pretty good indicator of a population,” Jones added.

Michael Blakey, the institute’s director, added that few African Americans in Williamsburg were free at the time.

“It either represents the conditions of an enslaved childhood or far less likely — but possibly — conditions for a free African American in childhood,” Blakey said.

The two other sets of remains belonged to men between the ages of 35 to 45 and possibly older, based on the analyses of their bones and teeth.

One of them stood 5 feet, 8 inches and was possibly the oldest of the three. His remains were found with a copper straight pin that likely bound clothing or a funeral shroud.

The other man stood 5 feet, 7 inches and was buried in a vest and trousers. His leg bones indicated the repetitive use of certain muscles, suggesting the heavy labor of someone who was enslaved.

The graves in Williamsburg are among Black burial grounds and cemeteries that are scattered throughout the nation and tell the story of the country’s deep past of slavery and segregation. Many Black Americans were excluded from white-owned cemeteries and built their own burial spaces, often as a form of resistance.

Descendants are working to preserve these grounds and cemeteries, many of which are at risk of being lost and lack support.

“All over the country there has been reckless disregard for African American bodies,” said Harshaw, of First Baptist.

“We are now becoming an example to the rest of the country,” she said. “We’re getting interest from everywhere, with people saying, ‘Wait a minute, how do you guys do this?’”

The church’s original meeting house was destroyed by a tornado in 1834. First Baptist’s second structure, built in 1856, stood there for a century.

But an expanding Colonial Williamsburg museum bought the property in 1956 and turned it into a parking lot.

The museum tells the story of Virginia’s late 1700s capital through colonial-era buildings and interpreters. But it failed to tell First Baptist’s story.

Founded in 1926, the museum did not tell Black stories until 1979, even though more than half of the people who lived in the colonial capital were Black, and many were enslaved.

In recent years, Colonial Williamsburg has boosted its efforts to tell a more complete story, placing a growing emphasis on African-American history.

The museum plans to recreate First Baptist’s original meeting house on the land where it once stood, said Gary, the museum’s director of archaeology.

“A big part of that is to commemorate the space where the burials are located,” he said.

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