Urban Ecology

William Gordon Johnson, May 20, 1953 - March 20, 2013

2013-05-13T06:47:00.002-05:00

William "Bill" Johnson was my brother. I always called him my biggest brother but there was no other -- he was my only brother. That he passed away almost two months ago and that I am only now writing my memorial to him is a failing on my part. I was caught off guard by his death.

Here is the text of his obituary, what he wanted written about himself:

William G. Johnson, age 59, of Akron passed away at his home March 20, 2013 after a brief illness.

Bill was born May 20, 1953 in Akron to the late Edna M. Johnson. He was a 1971 Graduate of St. Vincent High School and attended Akron University. He worked many years in Quality Control.

Bill loved music, he enjoyed playing the Bass Guitar and listening to jazz and rock music especially Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis. He loved to read, enjoying history and all types of machinery from cars, trucks, trains, to tanks. He was very knowledgeable about cars, able to pick out the make and model of a classic at any distance. Bill was a natural athlete, a long distance runner in his youth, and long distance cyclist on his Green Raleigh Bike later in life. He loved the Summit County Metro Parks, he spent many hours enjoying the parks. He also enjoyed photography of all kinds, especially taking photos of his children.

He is survived by his wife and best friend of 37 years, Virginia Johnson; his daughter, Alania Claire Johnson (Boyfriend, Andrew Mason) of Kingsville, Texas; his son, Miles William Johnson (girlfriend, Jennifer Patchen) of Berkley, California; his sisters, Becky Johnson of Akron, and Gena Johnson of North Hollywood, California; his father-in-law, George Botzman; and many brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces, and nephews.

Bill had a huge soft spot for cats, he would feed any stray that would stop by, because of his love, memorial contributions may be made to One of a Kind Pets, 1929 W. Market St., Akron, Ohio 44313

There are no calling hours or services. Private interment of his ashes will take place at a later date. Please visit www.dunnquigley.com to share condolences and memories at Bill's book of memories.

####

I want to share one memory that speaks to my brother at his best: playful, subversive, proud of himself and his black brothers.

We went to Catholic schools, first St. Bernard's grade school then St. Vincent High School (now St. Vincent-St. Mary's) in Akron, Ohio. Bill was two years older than me so when I got to St. V he was a junior. At the time, St. V was publicly renowned for its athletics (as it is occasionally today) but for those of us who navigated its hallways, it was notorious for a kind of thuggishness that sometimes comes with athletic attainment. And there weren't many black students. In Bill's class there was one girl, I think, and four or five boys. He was friends with Steve and Tony.

My recollection of dates is fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure it was the school talent show of my freshman year. I don't think I told anyone but I was terrified of the junior and senior class boys, brutish Polish and Italian linebackers (Akron was a very ethnic place back then) who tormented their underlings. I digress.

Everyone was required to attend talent show. My brother and Tony performed. Tony, who I think was a running back for the football team, had a black belt in karate. Both Bill and Tony had glorious afros (as you can probably tell from the photo). Tony, with Bill's able assistance, proceeded to break things with his hands. Boards, bricks, stuff. Neither said a word. Just bowed and walked off stage, leaving their handiwork behind.

Everyone knew that was my brother and his friend. All eight of us scrawny, black and brown freshmen knew we were safe.

And lastly, for Bill, for all of us, a poem by Lucille Clifton. This gave me the courage to finally write this remembrance (I realize now that all 3 men have now passed away -- Bill and Tony, and Steve, their friend):

you are not

your brothers keeper

you are

your brother

the one

hiding in the bush

is you

the one

lying on the grate

is you

the mad one in the cage

or on the podium

is you

the king is you

the kike is you

the honky is you

the nigger is you

the bitch is you

the beauty is you

the friend is you

the enemy oh

others have come

to say this

it is not

metaphor

you are not

your sisters keeper

you are

your sister yes

From The Ones, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

(thanks to Jean Riesman for sending just what I needed)

Visualizing Emancipation

2013-03-22T10:09:00.001-05:00

I forgot I had written this so I'm posting it now:

I teach near New York City. So that means I have access to a vast array of cultural riches. Of course I rarely get out of my sauna-like office and on the Metro North to do anything in the city. So one of my New Year's resolutions was to do things. I had an event at Columbia scheduled for this past Thursday so I decided that would be the day. Of course it was 15 degrees. I went anyway. It was awful cold and out of respect for my partner's reputation I couldn't wear my father's old gray fuzzy fleece ice fishing pants to Columbia. But my first destination was Harlem and no one was stylin'. I scurried as fast as my frozen knees would take me to the Schomburg for the Visualizing Emancipation exhibit.

From Visualizing Emancipation

Deborah Willis, the brilliant photographer, scholar and curator, has brought together 171 images of enslaved and free black people, with emancipation as a key event. We are in a long remembrance of the Civil War, 150 years ago, foreshadowed by the South's secession, beginning with its first battle at Fort Sumter in 1861 and continuing on for deadly years, ending in victory by Union forces. Central to this victory was Emancipation. It depleted the South of laborers and allowing black men to bear arms on the Federal side. Visualizing Emancipation depicts slavery and freedom, the pride of bearing arms and the hope of the contraband Negroes escaping into the Union camps. It shows colored folk as both ordinary and courageous, it shows a people longing for citizenship and then struggling to keep it.

Did you know that smiling is a learned response? Before photography we didn't do it as much as we do today. Most of the subjects of this early photography don't smile. One couldn't move, lest the exposure get ruined, but neither does anyone look away from the camera. There are images of newly freed men and women in the rucksack and rags of their enslavement and an emerging middle class carefully quaffed with the children in matching coats.

Much has been made this year of the tradition of Watch Night, the New Year's Eve vigil kept in many African-American churches which was popularized the year black folks stayed up waiting for word that Lincoln had actually signed the Emancipation Proclamation. And it is a wonderful tradition but Willis's exhibit has several photos of Emancipation Day celebrations across the decades. On June 19th black people by the hundreds would come out, listening to speakers, marching with banners, claiming their place anew in the nation they had helped build. Those celebrations continue today. Now everyone calls it Juneteenth, specifically remembering the day the last slaves were freed, June 19, 1865, in Galveston Texas.

The exhibit ended March 1, but Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer have put together a "pioneering" volume, including some never before published photos. Today, we are inundated with images, most of us possessing photographic technology that no one would have imagined possible in the late 19th and early 20th century. We forget there was a time when a family portrait might be a once in a life time event, to be shared with loved ones on the equivalent of little calling cards called cartes de visite. When freedom, once so elusive, had to be celebrated and documented in the lives of ordinary people who had struggled to win and later, might die to protect.

On The Breeding Lesbians of South Brooklyn

2013-01-24T14:13:00.001-05:00

On the Habits and Habitats of the Breeding Lesbians of South Brooklyn

by Jean Kahler

1. The South Brooklyn Lesbian: Species or Race?

Much controversy surrounds the taxonomic status of Brooklyn Lesbians: should the Lesbians of North and South Brooklyn, concentrated respectively in Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick and Park Slope/Prospect Heights/Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy and adjacent neighborhoods, be considered separate races of a single species, like the Yellow- and Red-shafted Flickers of species Colaptes auratus? Or are they more properly defined as two separate species, like Baltimore and Bullock’s Orioles, once thought types of Northern Oriole?

Red Shafted Flicker Tail Feather

It is the position of this author that the Northern and Southern Brooklyn Lesbians must properly be separately named species of the genus Sappho. The two display marked distinctions in plumage and diet, with the Northern species preferring H&M ‘80’s nostalgia synthetics and Pabst Blue Ribbon and the Southern natural fibers, Dansko clogs, and whiskey-based cocktails.

The issue is complicated by what has been termed the “Zelig Effect” common to all Lesbian populations, in which new couples often rapidly shift in appearance such that the individuals are nearly identical in under a year’s time. Some argue that so-called casuals to a given section of the borough — Northerns or Southerns blown off course while attempting to avoid an ex* or by mistaking the G train for a real subway — may defensively adapt to the foreign environment by taking on traits of the dominant population, ultimately fooling the natives into accepting her as one of their own.

*[Though many Brooklyn lesbians do, in fact, engage in the ex-hoarding behavior typical of the genus, this trait is less strong in the NYC species than in those of smaller locales. Further research is needed to determine whether this phenotypical variation is a result of founder effect or or specific environmental pressures. Ed note: By "ex" the author means ex-lovers]

Gay Pride

However, the crucial test in any instance of the so-called species problem is interbreeding: populations that can interbreed, even if they do so only in limited geographical areas of overlap, are properly named as races, while those that cannot are defined as individual species. The breeding behavior of the types of Brooklyn Lesbian is, again, a matter of some argument in scientific circles, but while interbreeding between the groups (perhaps limited to the transitional borderlands of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant) is suspected by some scholars, it has never been conclusively proven. Therefore, this paper will concern itself only with the Southern species, Sappho parkslopica.

2. Courtship Behavior: Territoriality and Dominance

As is common across the Animal kingdom, parkslopica engages in multiple forms of territory-marking behavior during the courtship phase. Scent-marking behaviors include environmental marking via burning of incense and home-brewing of kombucha, and also pheromone-mimckry via topical application of ginger oil and/or Old Spice. The use of patchouli, once wide-spread, is now seen only rarely. Its decline is not well-understood but likely related to its lousy smell.

Lesbian Cats

It is theorized that cat dander, on clothing and emanating from apartment doors and windows, also acts as a means of alerting Lesbians to one another’s presence. In that case, the broadcasting of said dander may be increased by Stoop-Sitting, a territorial behavior common across all species of Brooklynites, in which the available Lesbian spends several hours of the afternoon or evening sitting on the front steps of her building, nodding or jutting her chin out at those who pass by, to both display herself to potential mates and ward off rivals. Stoop-Sitting is especially important to the dog-owning Lesbian, who will often further clarify her species-identification by naming her dog or dogs for lesbian literary, musical, or style icons, e.g., Rita Mae, Tigre, Rosie, Indigo.

Sound-marking is less common among parkslopica than among straight Brooklynites in general, though the Acoustic Guitar behavior seen in other Lesbian species may be incorporated into Stoop-Sitting. Some members of the species will engage in a fascinating method of call-amplification by convincing a local bartender or barista to let them “DJ” the bar or coffee shop by plugging their iPods into the sound system and playing a mix of courtship music (Sleater Kinney, Tracy Chapman, k.d. lang, etc.)

Dominance behavior in parkslopica generally revolves around community organizations, the Park Slope Food Coop being the most well known. The Lesbian in search of a mate will almost without fail join at least one and often more. The Lesbian seeking to assert dominance will volunteer to join the governing board of her community garden or become the Squad Leader of her Food Coop work shift, thus advertising to potential mates her free time, high level of interest in types of kale, and robust ability to “process issues,” all desirable attributes in a partner. The truly dedicated dominant Lesbian may seek to organize her own food coop or Community Supported Agriculture group, perhaps as a means of proving her ability to manage multiple mates in a polyamorous context.

3. Reproductive Mating Behavior

Little is known about the reproductive mating behaviors of Lesbians, except that they are nothing like those portrayed in the L-Word. Scholars have ascertained that mating for the purpose of reproduction takes place in both home and clinic settings. Turkey basters are emphatically not involved; the popular myth surrounding them may be a cynical attempt on the part of the species to distract attention from actual methods by appealing to male insecurity: a man wondering if other guy’s output could really fill such a large device is unlikely to ask further questions.

Scholars agree that reproductive mating in parkslopica involves or perhaps requires large amounts of poetry and blogging.

The Author and her little guy

4. Rearing of Young

Signs of successful reproductive mating in parkslopica include the feathering of their nests with bird-themed art and fabric goods from Etsy, Scandinavian wooden furniture (in particular Stokke, IKEA), and books on baby sign language. Plumage changes invariably include baby-carrying devices, each accompanied by a particular set of calls proclaiming its superiority over other types. Other typical call patterns include long, apparently thought-out opinions on Attachment Parenting, Baby-Led Weaning, Co-Sleeping, and the pernicious qualities of fruit juice. Interestingly, calls of Lesbians with male offspring often contain diatribes for or, more commonly, against circumcision, which are in many cases the first sign a Lesbian has ever given a damn about the existence of penises.

While these calls as rendered by different Lesbians sound identical to the non-Lesbian ear, field observations indicate variations exist outside of the range of non-Lesbian hearing. Two Lesbians seeming to espouse the same parenting philosophies frequently react as if their ideas are so opposed and mutually repugnant that the two can no longer associate with one another at all. This conflict behavior is thought to ensure separation between couples adequate to prevent the communalism and pair re-shuffling common to Lesbian species during other periods of the life cycle.

Safety Note: Just as naturalists and tourists are rightly warned against standing between a mother bear and her young or a hippopotamus and the water, researchers in the field encountering a Lesbian with young should under no account challenge the Lesbian, however unintentionally, by inquiring who the “real mother” is or whether BPA is “really so bad.”

5. Ecological Succession:

Urban Lesbian species have long been recognized as part of the vanguard of the gentrification process, whereby neighborhoods whose rents are low (often as a result of industrial and/or Robert Moses-style “urban renewal”-related blight) become colonized/invaded (as styled by the gentrifiers vs. the pre-gentrification residents) by artists and Lesbians, whose presence in turn prepares the area for habitation by, in turn, graduate students, gay men, hip single straights drawn to apartments in which a lack of basic interior building materials, previously proof of squalor, is recast as “luxury” (See: “spacious open floor plan,” “exposed brick”), and, ultimately, investment bankers whose children’s first names are Anglo-Saxon surnames. Naturally, pre-gentrification populations do include a naturally-occurring low rate of Lesbianism, as all populations are theorized to, but it is the influx of so-called “pack” Lesbian clusters whose presence triggers or indicates the early phases of gentrification.

While Lesbians’ place in this process is sometimes self-described as motivated by an attraction to “authenticity,” as otherwise observed in middle- and upper-middle-class Lesbians’ fondness for markers for blue collar culture (Carhart jackets, diners, mullets), it is more probably a result of the lower income of women versus men (an effect intensified by the lack of a balancing male salary in Lesbian relationships), particularly women who work for non-profit organizations or the no-profit sector of feminist bookstores and ethical tea houses.

Species parkslopica gets its name from the early phases of genrtification in the neighborhood of Park Slope, but the process of succession is so advanced that, while individual Lesbians still live in the neighborhood, the environment can no longer support a full pack. Facing extinction in its eponymous zone, parkslopica has established new colonies in other south Brooklyn neighborhoods, with Ditmas Park, Windsor Terrace/Kensington, and Crown Heights seeing rising levels of Lesbians With Children.

Curiously, parkslopica’s range appears limited to high ground; there are no credible reports of colonies in Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, or similarly low-lying neighborhoods. Possibly this is due more to an aversion to salt spray than to low altitude, as the Lesbian population of low ground areas of inland Brooklyn (Bushwick, Bed-Stuy) is rising. Such an aversion would be unsurprising in a genus containing large numbers of individuals whose instinct leads them to spend the heat of summer not at the shore but in the woods of central Michigan, well-insulated from salt and sand.

Reports surface from time to time of parkslopica clusters appearing in areas of Jersey City and Hoboken, but these are largely unsubstantiated and are likely evidence of the Mocking-Broker effect, wherein real estate brokers attempt to lure customers to a given neighborhood by claiming that a sizable population of that customer’s species is already established there. While individual Lesbian families may relocate to join packs in Portland, the Bay Area, or Northampton, a strong taboo exists against leaving Brooklyn for other NYC boroughs, as evidenced by the bonding call, “Death Before Queens.”

Looking Back to Nov. 6: Walking The Akron, OH Rust Belt Walk In Ward 4

2013-01-21T09:03:00.001-05:00

GOTV IN AKRON:

Walking the Rust-Belt Walk in Ward 4

Jean Riesman

A fuzzy shot of our staging location

GOTV is not the Akron Fox network affiliate that was flickering above the bar at the New Era Restaurant, where the Serbian dumplings have the specific gravity of uranium and the apple strudel the lightness of the Red Bull Stratos: it's the acronym for "get out the vote," the relentless strategies (including door-knocking, voter registration, early voting turn out and buses full of church goers voting on Souls-to-the-Polls Sunday) that helped secure Ohio for Obama last Tuesday. The dumplings and strudel fortified us for the campaign's last pavement-pounding weekend – as did the Fox channel's back-to-back political ads, a low-budget stream of local, state, and national Republican consciousness.

Crystal, Jean and Pat Laying Out Turf for the Big Push

Our job was to knock on carefully-selected doors in West Akron up to six times before the polls closed on Tuesday night and thereby, if necessary, to badger our targeted Obama voters into exercising their franchise. While Ohio early voting had begun October 2, Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted continued to do everything in his litigious power to limit hours and access, especially in Democratic-leaning districts: that is, in dense urban lower-income communities of color such as West Akron. His tactics backfired. Lines at the Akron Board of Elections were up to four hours long during the last stretch of early voting, and prospective voters were equally undeterred at precinct polling locations on Election Day.

At our Ward 4 outpost, ordinarily the combined space of the Just 'N Café and the Bizness Lab, we were superintended by a formidable local African-American woman who could re-focus chattering volunteers with a hard look from her chair behind the central-command computer. Hustled out to cover the next piece of turf, we worked our soggy printouts in the windy drizzle, drilling down to the last sporadic voters who might need a final nudge. Behind many doors were the voices – "already voted!" – of the already-voted or stern parents promising to turn their young'uns out to do their civic duty; behind others, TVs on and nobody answering; and others, either nobody home yet or nobody home, in vacant single-family houses or empty apartments with Obama materials dangling from a previous pass.

Akron used to be the Rubber City, running on the tire factories of Goodyear, Firestone and other manufacturing giants. The New Era had refreshed decades of General Tire workers getting off their shifts across the street. Plant closures hit the city hard. Downtown seems to be patching up its post-industrial distress, but in many parts of Ward 4, tired houses and weary residents reflect long-term unemployment, foreclosure, and the hard work of just getting by. The ravages of 1960s-era urban renewal also are etched in the abrupt dead ends of West Akron's streets, where we kept discovering that our next house number was on the other walled-off side of the interstate highway system.

Other than a scattering of lawn-signs and bumperstickers, there was not much evidence of the Romney/Ryan campaign. A handful of operatives made mischief: Obama/Biden lawn-signs had been regularly disappearing, as did – on election eve – the oblong placards we had just hung on doorknobs and storm-door latches, imprinted with the proper address of the right polling location for those particular voters.

To no avail: with over 74% turnout Ward 4 went 88% for the president on November 6, Ohio closed the deal, and Romney conceded before midnight in a form of early voting – with his feet, out of the battleground states and out of his misbegotten place in American political history.

Nia -- Purpose

2012-12-31T08:26:00.000-05:00

I love Akron, not in small part because I am constantly surprised. People say to me you have come home or how can you stand to be back here. But the home of my birth is now under the pavement of a greatly expanded Akron General Hospital and the home of my youth is occupied (happily I hope) by a grandmother and the now adolescent grandson she is raising. That she is white and he is African-American indicates how much the city where I was born has changed and how much more today it feels like home.

The Symbols of Kwanzaa from
http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/index.shtml

I went to Kwanzaa last night. I am an occasional participant in a community-based research action team as part of Project Ujima. I missed our Kwanzaa on Friday (Ujima -- Collective Work and Responsibility). Project Ujima is a 3 year project to investigate and create utilization plans for the new Community Learning Centers (CLC) in the Buchtel Cluster, that is West Akron. I will write more about this later except to say the buildings are beautiful and participants in the effort are a a lively crowd. The Buchtel CLC and the Men's Group of Centenary United Methodist Church sponsored last night's Kwanzaa at the church so I went in support.

Kwanzaa is a made up holiday for an historically displaced people. It tries to provide for the ancestors of the polyglot captives of the slave trade what refugees here from all over the world experience when celebrating the rituals and holidays of their home lands -- memory of who we were, nostalgia for a place we never knew, commitment to be better people where we are.

There were about 40 people at last night's event. Many children and members of the Buchtel High CLC class of 2014 and graduates of the class of 2012. Our sweet colored children (they would hate that I call them that but I get to be the cranky middle-aged colored auntie here). The theme of the day was Nia or Purpose and the young people presented on their purpose, frequently in terms of what God wanted of them. Then we had a presentation -- Israel and Palestine.

The Seven Principles

I was worried when I saw this on the program for the night. African-American Christians can be quite conservative about Israel believing evangelical myth-making about the inevitability and necessity of it's triumph over the "Arabs". But this was different, and I was again surprised by my new/old hometown.

Dr. Martha Banks, PhD, a research neuropsychologist and church member, along with maybe 15 other African-Americans of disparate faiths had gone on an October fact-finding mission to Palestine organized by Interfaith Peace Builders. They were the second of their African Heritage Delegations. Her purpose was to tell the truth about the occupation and to show how it compared to historical experiences of racism, apartheid and Jim Crow. It was a lengthy and brilliant presentation that wove together history of the partition of Palestine, scriptural exegesis, African-American consciousness of structural racism, comparisons to the sequestration of Native Americans on reservations and many, many photographs. Rev. Stephanie Lee, pastor of Centenary and delegation member, took questions. It was a challenging and difficult presentation for everyone but folks, including the young ones, hung with it and asked important questions.

I have invited Dr. Banks to submit a brief version of her presentation to Urban Ecology, but to end the year I have posted an update from Jean Riesman about her work this summer in Beit Arabya rebuilding the Palestinian home in Jerusalem that had been demolished last year by the Israeli Army. May the coming year bring us all closer to justice and peace.

RUBBLE TO RUBBLE: The Last Demolition of Beit Arabiya

2012-12-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

by Jean Riesman

Beit Arabiya is already down. Returned, again, to rubble. Rebuilt this summer for the fifth time since 1998. Re-dedicated July 16, 2012; demolished, November 1, 2012. Gone. No, not gone. The rubble will stay this time. Right where it landed. Or right where it is now, after anything retrievable has been retrieved. The rubble will be the place. The rubble will imply the house. All six of the houses that have stood on that spot. Each one the home of Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh and their seven children. "Beit Arabiya," in Arabic, for "Arabiya's house." It sounds the same in Hebrew.

In the rubble is the work. Pouring the foundation. Wrestling the jacks into position to hold up the beams for the pouring of the flat cement roof, and then wrestling them down. Passing the concrete blocks from the truck to the site, hand over hand, the buckets of cement, the rocks, the floor tiles. Stacking the concrete blocks into walls, sandwiched by mortar. Plastering over the concrete blocks. Painting over the plaster. The rubble holds all that kinetic energy. It embodies that painstakingly-gathered attention, task by shared task.

Beit Arabya Demolished November 2012

It contains all the rubble that came before it, all the terror of those previous demolitions, all the policy behind that terror – in Anata, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem.

The rubble is local. It joins the rubble in the next field, and the rubble cleared from the previous demolition. Some of which had gone into the reconstruction, especially through the genius of Riad, the Palestinian stone-mason who engineered a series of retaining walls and garden walls and low walls around wounded pomegranate trees recovering in new dirt.

The rubble is global. It bears the fingerprints of the all Palestinians, Israelis, and international volunteers who – gathered together by the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition (ICAHD) – re-assembled it, time after time. It bears the marks of the American-made bulldozers that, six times over, turned it back into rubble. It bears the collective entropy of an international community's failure to hold Israel accountable for the violent cyclical alchemy of rubble to rubble.

Voter Suppression First Thing in the Morning -- Nov. 6, 2012

2012-11-06T12:08:00.003-05:00

Mr. Woodall was our first visitor. He couldn't find his polling location. Since he has lived in West Akron, OH he has voted at Centenary United Methodist Church. Earlier this year the County election commissioners, half Republican and half Democratic came to a deadlock over the number of polling locations to close so the decision was up to our industrious Secretary of State who voted with the Republicans, closing almost half of the voting locations in the county. Mr. Woodall, a spry man looked to be someplace between 85 and 90 years old. He was going to be the first in line I imagine since our polls opened at 6:30 and he was at our door by 6:45. Luckily our fearless leader, Mary Sobah, is an expert at looking up polling locations so we were able to help. We thought maybe he had misplaced the bright orange card announcing the change in location. Then a younger woman came in and we knew we had a problem. We put together signs advising folks to come see us to figure out their new polling location. We posted them at Centenary UMC. By mid-morning eight people came in trying to figure out where they were to vote. We expect more. We were happy to be open at 5:30 this morning. We worry we missed some of those early voters who didn't know we are here.

We have 6 volunteers out working eight areas of our ward, reminding people to vote, asking questions about polling locations, listening for other instances of voter suppression. We understand we are ahead on percentages at the polling locations. More updates as we have them.

It's been a busy morning.

Voter Suppression in Southern Ohio -- Abe Rybeck Reports

2012-11-05T14:24:00.003-05:00

Today's guest GOTV canvasser is Abe Rybeck, good friend and Executive Director of the Theater Offensive in Boston. He is volunteering in southern Ohio in the towns across the Ohio River from his hometown of Wheeling, WV. Thank you Abe for this first hand account. It is a perfect example of why we must stay vigilant, committed and active until this effort is done.

Belmont County Ohio

Bobbi in Bridgeport hasn’t paid an overdue ticket she got last year from the Ohio State Troopers when the back right lights of her old dodge got knocked off. She thinks that means she’s NOT ALLOWED TO VOTE!

This is just one of the forms Voter Suppression takes and it makes my blood boil! The right-wingers who are pushing the restrictive voting laws are scaring poor people away from voting with the threat that when they show their id, they’ll get busted for any little thing on their record!

Bobbi is a Licensed Practical Nurse. On Sunday, she was in between shifts, taking care of her VERY sick mom, Hannah, who is suffering from two kinds of cancer. They live in the part of Bridgeport that flooded every year or two when I was growing up. Looks like they’re still dealing with that.

Bobbi feels that Obama is an honorable man, who is doing the best that can be done in a tough situation. She knows how that feels and she wants to vote for him.

So it’s tremendously satisfying to be here working on the Get Out The Vote effort in Southeastern Ohio! I’m staying with my sister on our family farm in West Virginia, then crossing the river each day to work in different towns in Ohio. Yesterday I was in Bridgeport. The Obama for Ohio campaign is so well organized! Courtney gave me excellent materials that helped convince Bobbi that voting wouldn’t put her in jail. Then Therese helped us figure out a place where Bobbi could vote legally without intimidation.

That was one of the many, many people I've been honored to meet Getting Out The Vote.

Shout out to Rebecca O Johnson up in Akron, who inspired and challenged me to do this in the first place! Off to my next shift!

The Last Few Hours of Early Voting - Nov. 5, 2012

2012-11-05T11:11:00.004-05:00

I took a cousin's absentee ballot down to the Board of Elections and finally got some photos of citizens waiting in line to early vote. These photos represent a 2 hour wait. On Sunday it was a 4 hour wait if you were in line by the end of the day.

Waiting in line at Akron Board of Elections

Another view

Twenty deep inside

Souls to Polls Update! Enormous Turnout

2012-11-04T17:09:00.002-05:00

Souls to Polls officially ended at 5 p.m. EST. That means you had to be in line by that time. At 4:30 there was a four hour wait to cast an early vote. Our continuing victory over voter suppression.

Souls to the Polls: Sunday, November 5, 2012

2012-11-04T16:32:00.002-05:00

The big Get Out The Vote effort today is Souls to the Polls. Churches, particularly African-American churches, throughout the region have organized to get their congregations to the Summit County Board of Elections for early voting (1-5 p.m., 470 Grant St. in case you read this and want to join the fun). Even though the temperature outside today (and yesterday) has averaged around 39F, their are long lines waiting patiently. Various organizations are grilling out while celebrities such as Aisha Tyler keeping the crowd piously entertained.

TwitPict by Jonathan Weisman, NYTimes

Barack Obama's candidacy has become contentious for some Black church folk, for his pro-choice stand and recent support of gay marriage. The reluctance of some ministers to encourage their congregations to early vote (not to mention voting at all) has upset many of my parents' old friends. Last election some of them canvassed door-to-door, all of them cooked crockpots full of delicious stews, soups and chilis, and helped at endless phone banks. Four years later they are older, sicker but no less determined to see Barack Obama re-elected.

So I am encouraged by the reported turn out (we can't get there since we are staffing a canvass staging location in West Akron). It has been fascinating watching the women we work with at the local office realize Pat and I are partners. First there is cautious observation of our behavior. They love the president but maybe don't know many out queer people (they all know someone queer, generally in the choir of their church, usually quite closeted). Once they realize that we can cover lots of territory on a canvass, willingly make endless phone calls and generally do anything we are told to do they seem to decide that maybe President Obama was right.

So here's to showing up, the first and most important rule for becoming a good organizer.

Day 2 GOTV-- Sunday Morning

2012-11-04T11:34:00.000-05:00

I'm off running errands for our staging location so Pat Maher is going to handle the first post of the day. Take it away, Pat!

The Staging Location Banner at Just In Cafe

Yesterday during brief breaks in the action at our staging location, the longtime organizer who runs our campaign substation here in West Akron was making sure everyone she knows was getting to the Board of Elections to vote. Her name is Mary Sobah and she is a one woman polling place as well as a stalwart organizer who has been slogging for months through the painstaking work that makes this campaign so effective. When her grandson came in to fill out an absentee ballot -- it was his first time voting -- he turned to us all and said "I just did my part to save this country."

Mary Sobah, Our Fearless Leader

We spent yesterday as we'll spend the next three days: organizing "turf" -- the precinct maps and home address lists-- and training and dispatching canvassers into the streets. One woman who came in to canvass with her teenage daughter said she would be back today and tomorrow to canvass. Her eyes filled with tears as she told me she just couldn't let Romney win this election and so she would come out with us over the next few days. Another canvasser brought his 17-year old son. When they returned from their shift the son proudly told me he thought he had convinced an undecided voter to vote for Obama.

So yes I'm tired and surviving on too much caffeine and bizarre nutrition right now (it has been a downhill slide since yesterday morning's excellent oatmeal) but I love this work. This weekend is the culmination of all those walks down the streets of West Akron from the last few months, knocking on doors, talking to people, seeing who is voting how and voting when.

I think what is hard to see from outside the swing states like Ohio is that this campaign is based on a very finely honed organizing strategy. What is also hard to see is that the attempts at voter suppression here in Ohio have mobilized us. People here -- especially African Americans-- will not allow interference with their right to vote. Mainstream media has a tendency to construct people of color voters as hapless victims of right wing malfeasance -- a la the 47%! --- without acknowledging the solid community organizing in places like Akron and Cleveland and other cities. For example, those "Voter Fraud is a Felony" billboards that were placed in Cleveland and other communities a few weeks ago were sited in neighborhoods where Obama has been organizing for months. The right wing assumes an extraordinary level of stupidity and helplessness. Rest assured there is a huge voter protection mobilization in place on our side.

We heard yesterday that the lines at the Board of Elections in Akron yesterday were around the block. Today is "Souls to Polls" when churchgoers go straight from the pews to vote at the Board of Elections. Turnout is higher here already than it was in 08. We're gonna win this thing!

Fighting Voter Suppression One Door At A Time

2012-11-03T12:19:00.001-05:00

This is how voter suppression works in Ohio. Take the most populated ward, with the weakest turn out and then reduce the number of precincts and place each precinct's voting location in one school. Instead of 1400 people at a polling location there will be over 4500.

There is early voting at the Board
Of Election today through Monday. We here there's a giant traffic jam and folks are standing in line, patiently, for an hour or more.

This is a good thing. This weekend, Monday & Tuesday we are visiting everyone who has yet to vote 6 times to make sure they understand they can vote and where to do it. That's how we fight voter suppression one door, one voter, at a time.

The photo is of two canvassers just back from a cold, rainy day of door knocking.

Last Two Weeks -- Make Everyone's Vote Count

2012-10-22T09:40:00.001-05:00

Akron Preparing to Welcome the President

Two weeks and two days from now the young people at the local West Akron Obama for America office can stop getting up early and going to bed late, eating irregularly and not well (although I am told our office has the best food in the area) and courting us volunteers who want to help in the effort. I want to make sure our dedicated Obama-ites have a really good sleep on November 7 (and a fine victory party on Nov. 6) so I have signed up for every canvass shift I can between now and Nov. 6, including every shift between Nov. 1 and the polls closing on Nov. 6. Want to join this effort to help guarantee the re-election of Barack Obama? Get thee to Nevada or Colorado or Pennsylvania or Florida. Or come join us in Ohio to help GOTV (Get Out The Vote).

El Anatsui's Gravity & Grace @ the Akron Art Museum

2012-09-30T14:41:00.001-05:00

I had put it off to the last minute but now, given my upcoming travel schedule, is my last chance to see the exhibit by the sculpture El Anatsui. Drawing on his Ghanaian heritage and time teaching in Nigeria, El Anatsui use found and discarded objects, especially labels and caps from liquor bottles to create works fluid and provocative.

I realize I should have been living with these works but I let time run out DOR that. I'm grateful for the 45 minutes I had with these intensely attractive works.

The photo is a detail of a work called Eli (wall).

Remembering Those Swept Away -- 7 Years Gone

2012-08-30T10:47:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The misery and danger brought by Hurricane Isaac took many of us back to the horrifying aftermath of Katrina, the human failure and institutional neglect that resulted in over 50 levee breaks. Levee breaks, deterioration of the wetlands along the Gulf coast, and the relentless digging of industrial canals all contributed to the storm's awful aftermath -- almost 1,900 dead, another 135 still listed as missing, untold numbers who committed suicide or experienced shortened lifespans because of the poor response and evacuation.

Now the Plaquemines Parish Louisiana communities of Braithwaite and Scarsdale are flooded from inadequate levees, ones maintained by local governments. There is no unified system of levee standards, construction or maintenance in this country. The Army Corp of Engineers builds and manages some, states and local governments others. Here is a posting from the advocacy organization, Levees.org, remembering Katrina, that was posted minutes before they had to evacuate for Hurricane Isaac.

On Rubble

2012-08-14T09:26:00.002-05:00

Our friend, Jean Riesman is back from her 2nd summer working in Israel with the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition (ICAHD). The following is her account of the experience.

On Rubble

July 31, 2012

Rubble has become such a common feature of the West Bank landscape that it may seem almost geological. But it is not the output of a natural process over geologic time; it has an unnatural history. The shattered concrete, twisted rebar, mangled utility lines and shredded water tanks wherever the Israeli military has demolished a house are the wretched artifacts of human geography, the industrial waste of the occupation. Last year set new records for rubble production, with over 600 Palestinian structures razed and more than 1000 people displaced between the Green Line and the Jordan River, and 2012 is on track to exceed those numbers. If there is an analogy in nature, demolition orders are the state flower of the stateless, and the Israel's bulldozers are the lawnmowers. Rubble is what's left after the bulldozers are gone.

Some rubble doesn't stay rubble. As a serial act of resistance against the Israeli occupation, the Israeli Committee AgainstHousing Demolition (ICAHD) has rebuilt almost 200 homes in the West Bank since 1997. Every summer, ICAHD recruits international volunteers to work with a Palestinian construction crew on the original site and raise a new house from scratch in two weeks. Last July, I helped rebuild a home bulldozed in 2005, whose former residents – by 2011, including 10 children – since had been living under a tree and then in a neighbor's basement. While we were on the job, we stayed nearby at Beit Arabiya, or the House of Arabiya, now ICAHD's "peace center" (and temporary lodgings for the summer volunteers) but originally the home of Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh and their children. They had survived four previous demolitions and four previous reconstructions.

Six months later, both buildings – the one that we rebuilt and the one where we slept – again were added to Palestine's gross domestic product of rubble.

Uma Omar

Rubble is not merely the residual byproduct of Israeli policy but its objective: systematic Palestinian displacement through ruthless physical destruction and psychological intimidation. That the two structures were targeted together on a cold, wet January night was no coincidence. They jointly stood as acts of civil disobedience against a regime that methodically manufactures rubble. More than the landscape is scarred. When Arabiya's house was demolished for the first time, she did not speak for a month, and still struggles for her equanimity; her youngest son ran into the desert, found later that night asleep under a rock but never to recover fully. Like many others, the family whose home we rebuilt last summer was reluctant to build again and run the risk of a yet another demolition. So ICAHD, its Palestinian construction crew, and its international volunteers returned to the task of reclaiming Beit Arabiya for the fifth time since its foundation first was laid in 1994.

Riyad At Work

Rubble at close range is discrete, local, utilitarian, intimate. Beit Arabiya had red desert rock and pale delicately-veined cut marble, the gray matter of crumbled cement and crushed concrete blocks, hunks of rebar and rusted networks of chain-link fence, fragments of floor tile and remnants of PVC pipe, laminated wooden drawers gone trapezoidal and shards of a lavender plastic laundry basket, sparkling broken glass and a kid's red-streaked marble, countless plastic soda bottles and flapping plastic bags. We were instructed to set aside the clean rock, marble, and tile (no clusters of cement still attached) for Riyad, the Palestinian mason. The rest we gathered by hand or hoe, often passed in buckets in a human chain to the pile downhill growing by the ton. It was heavy, but it was not passive. Rubble made me its apprentice, demanding that I learn how to assess its density and whether I could carry it alone, how to walk on rubble carrying rubble without losing my center of gravity, how to dump rubble without the wind slapping the lighter bits of trash back in my face. Rubble worked me hard, and after a few days I could dump a bucket high rather than low, even climb on the pile and toss my debris a little higher, overhand.

This rubble's story was not over. With the rock we retrieved, Riyad crafted retaining walls, some in double rows for new rose bushes, and low rings around replanted pomegranate trees. With rescued marble and tile he laid out walkways and stairways, level on the level. He turned marble slabs the long way for a kind of vertical paneling on one of the building's outside walls. A genius of geometry, he built deliberately, each element considered in its essential dimensions, assembled into a thing of cumulative beauty. The stones that the bulldozer rejected, in the rubble of Beit Arabiya, were sculpted into the rising home.

Albany GA Civil Rights Museum Freedom Singers

2012-07-14T12:27:00.001-05:00

Old Mt. Zion Church is where, in 1962, the Albany Movement marchers would step off to begin voter registration efforts. Only 28 African-Americans were registered among the twelve counties of SW Georgia.

Every 2nd Saturday of the month the Freedom Singers, led by its original leader Rutha Harris, tells stories & sing history for anyone who shows up.

I'm happy to be in Albany today and for the opportunity to here the Freedom Singers again, 50 years on still telling the Civil Right Movement.

What is the rhythm that carries our movements today? Who will carry our social change traditions for the next 50 years?

Always Heed a Kingfisher's Warning -- Natural History of Vacant Lots 3

2012-06-25T17:40:00.001-05:00

Today's guest blogger is my very own non-matrimonial spousal equivalent, Patricia Maher. Pat is a homeopath, astrologer and a closet naturalist. Pat is an avid birdwatcher, amateur entomologist, and passionate observer of the natural world and the body politic.

Always Heed a Kingfisher’s Warning…. And other cautionary tales

by Patricia Maher

When Rebecca and I were first looking at land to buy in Akron, Ohio, we considered two pairs of lots – one on E Lods Street (no doubt a corruption of the Polish city of Lodz) and one on N Maple Street. Her relatives had settled in both neighborhoods in the early and middle parts of the 20^th century, and we liked the idea of making those roots real. The City of Akron had made lots available to buy on both these streets. We ultimately chose the N Maple St. site, in part because two kingfishers admonished us severely when we stood on Lods, warning us away. When we looked at the N Maple lots, two kingfishers buzzed us but didn’t comment. Thanks for clarifying our decision!

Belted Kingfisher

I have learned that kingfishers have a lot to say, and like my mother – who was the crankiest of Virgos – they are usually saying to me something like “Oh for gods sake you had better not …”

The times I’ve ignored a kingfisher’s warning there has been hell to pay, for example, a kayak trip that turned unexpectedly perilous, with bad water, bad weather and a rescue (thankfully not me!).

So the site of our straw bale homes on N Maple St. is a short cul-de-sac that abuts the Erie Canal towpath, a 100-mile wooded walkway along the Cuyahoga River. The closet naturalist in me is thrilled: I am surrounded by the delightful Babel of birdsong and insect calls, and I get to run around with my butterfly net. (Hmm, perhaps I’m not so in the closet!) It turns out that butterfly nets are rather hard to wield and I am out of practice, having last used one when I was about 9.

There are kingfishers just down the street, hanging out on the river. There are at least two pairs of nesting orioles across from my house, outfitted in an almost day-glo orange. Just last week, I heard an outburst of sudden warning calls from songbirds; I looked up, thinking a raptor was nearby. Well, it was Chessie, as I like to call Chesapeake, Akron’s own downtown peregrine falcon, as she zoomed past. (Chessie, after all, was the name of my first cat.) Of course, it could have been McKinley, Chessie’s newest mate since her long time partner Bandit died in February. You gotta love a city that names its resident falcons!

Back to my butterfly net and my ungainly pirouetting across the construction site to catch butterflies. Today’s catch and release netted a pale yellow Clouded Sulfur, and very manic small black butterfly that might have been a Northern Cloudywing, but I’m not sure since it escaped my net several times before I could get a good look.

I knew Akron was the place for me when I discovered that there are Sphinx moths here, those beautiful giant daytime moths in art deco designs that fly around flower gardens like hummingbirds, slurping up nectar with their huge proboscises. God I love them! Just couple of weeks ago I thought I saw one enjoying some water that had collected on the ground from my endless task of washing out earth plaster buckets. The moth was big and black with striking orange markings on its abdomen. Hmm, not a sphinx moth after all but who was this handsome creature, I wondered?

Peach Borer Moth

It turned out to be a peach tree borer, a clearwing moth that is considered to be a “wasp mimic.” Its larvae are terribly destructive, and bore into peach trees, unfortunately for our friends across the street who have quite an array of stone fruit trees growing up.

And oh, the wolf spiders! Really long–legged. They’re everywhere: on the walls of my almost finished house, enjoying the cool plaster, and hanging out in the pile of empty buckets outside. The homeopath in me has my milk sugar at the ready – I don’t think this is a remedy yet but soon it will be!

Who Knew? June is Black Music Month! Meet Sister Gertrude Morgan

2012-06-20T17:41:00.000-05:00

Sr. Gertrude and Her Artwork

Yes!, according to The Root. So while I still have time, I will take this opportunity to highlight two women and one book. The women: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, gospel singer, guitarist (I personally think Elvis, among others, ripped off her style) and Sister Gertrude Morgan, an extremely pious street preacher form New Orleans. The book: The Fan Who Knew Too Much by Anthony Heilbut.

Singing isn't exactly how one might describe what she did. It was more of a chant. A syncopated, rocking kind of chant. I'm the Bread that raised the dead, I am that bread, I am that bread, I am the bread, I am that bread... Glory! Glory! Holy! I don't listen to much gospel music anymore, too polished, too sanitized, too smug. But I love this poverty stricken old lady who took in orphans and painted ecstatic pictures. Others loved her too. Sr. Gertrude made an album in 1970, Let's Make A Record.

Sr. Gertrude sings for everyone

Then Hurricane Katrina came through and folks remembered the lady who tried to save New Orleans soul. The dj King Britt made a re-mix of Le't Make a Record, taking it on tour to benefit the rebuilding of the city that Sr. Gertrude loved.

Sr. Gertrude's Artwork

It's hurricane season again, and the New Orleans is always on my mind, along with the people who love it and try to save it from perdition, toxic devastation or the mighty winds traveling from the west coast of Africa, gathering their strength, perhaps, from all those lost in the waters in that horrifying trade that brought our people, unwillingly, to these shores.

Updates and New Thoughts on Disturbed Places

2012-06-19T10:05:00.002-05:00

Updates

In case you missed it, there was an update on the African migrant situation in Israel in Monday's NY Times. Jean Riesman will be back with her own analysis, either from Israel, or when she returns after July 19.

The Peekskill Public Housing Petition is almost to 100 signers. Read Margaret Rubick's post and sign on!

Disturbed Places

Me, Installing Straw Bales

In early spring I picked up my Uncle John to bring him to our construction sites. He wanted to see the houses even though it was hard for him to get around very easily, straw bales and earth plaster was everywhere. After that we had a little tour of the neighborhood.

One way to think of a vacant lot is as a disturbed place. Our land had been, a long, long time ago, pristine forest, or even farther back, buried under a glacier. While the word glaciation is one of my favorites to say and think about, I'm not sure it's a helpful way to think about the vast resource of unoccupied urban land that has become available since the Great Recession.

What is now vacant, like much of Hickory St. where we are building, had been occupied by structures at one time. When I took my uncle for the tour I asked him to point out some landmarks. He could see homes where I saw vast reaches of mowed grass. We started at our end, the corner of North Maple and Hickory.

"I think Aunt Marie lived here, Mama's sister."

"And then they moved up the hill. Go that way," he pointed toward the railroad track. As we climbed we came to the corner of Silver St. and Hickory.

"Yeah" (imagine a very gruff voice, and soft) "See, Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Joe lived here," (one of her cherry trees still stands). And Mama lived here. I was born here". He points to a lot near the western corner. Grandma and her two sisters lived close for years.

As I contemplate the meaning of being back in Akron, "coming home", I'm very aware how deep my family roots go here. The Chapmans moved here from Columbus, Ohio at the turn of the 20th century. The three sisters married and had many children. There has been a Chapman descendant on or near Hickory St. for over 100 years. The large trees along the Towpath Trail that borders our neighborhood grew up with my uncle. The neighborhood he knew, one that was an affordable and welcoming point of arrival for Great Migration settlers is now being marketed as an "arts district". The lively memory of Black migration -- jazz clubs, juke joints, full churches and overflowing schools -- being used to create a neighborhood that won't be affordable or necessarily welcoming. We will resist such efforts, since that is the ultimate disturbance, a gentrification that means a future group of people like my great aunts, uncles and grandparents would have no place live and claim as their own.

Problems in Peekskill, NY

2012-06-15T11:54:00.001-05:00

Margaret Rubick

There have been several egregious events in the small towns and cities of Westchester county, some notorious such as the murder of Kenneth Chamberlain last November. None has been more persistent than the ongoing disregard for the health, safety and rights of Peekskill public housing tenants. Joining Urban Ecology this week is my friend and colleague, Margaret Rubick to describe the current campaign to bring attention to these problems. Margaret is a writer, anti-racist activist and health advocate living and working in Westchester County, NY.

Problems in Peekskill, NY

“Gentrification: the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents.” – Merriam-Webster

I wonder if Habitat for Humanity does renovations. I have this fantasy that the organization might partner with the residents of public housing in Peekskill, NY, to clean, paint, fix broken water pipes, and rid the premises of mice and bugs. Although Bohlman Towers purportedly exists for the benefit of the poor and disabled, it does more to keep them down than lift them up. Some tenants are paying $1200 a month for a one-room apartment, have to ride in dirty elevators and put up with stains and odors of unknown origin.

And that is just one small part of the mess—the disrepair and the rodents are just symptoms of the systemic problems of human rights violations, illegal dealings and malfeasance in Peekskill public housing. The acting Housing Director is working without a contract, which is against HUD regulations. Harold Phipps, whose contract expired mid-2011, now stands accused of sexual harassment, of entering women’s apartments without notice, of locking young children out of dance rehearsals in the building, and of trying to bully the board into signing a new contract. Rents are being raised in an effort to evict tenants. The harassment is blatantly obvious.

No one can get copies of the by-laws for the local Housing Authority. The mayor, Mary Foster, disavows all knowledge of all activities, repeating at Common Council meetings for a long time that she has no authority over the board, although until just a few months ago, she appointed five of the members. Two are supposed to be tenant-elected representatives but I witnessed firsthand how one eligible candidate was tricked into having her application declared invalid. At the Common Council meetings, no one seems to know anything.

Enter Darrell Davis, a Peekskill-raised activist who lives in Westchester and is leading the fight against the betrayal by the Democrats in power. Davis helped get the mayor elected the first time she ran, hoping the change in leadership would make a difference. It didn’t. Davis, leading the Committee for Justice, along with residents of public housing, were polite and deferential in asking for change, believing for many, many months that change was coming. Now, after more than two years of voicing concerns, the meetings are not as peaceful. The mayor sits stony-faced (you can see her on YouTube) when African-Americans are at the podium. The racism IS that blatant.

This past Monday, I attended the Common Council meeting. As speakers lined up for their five minutes of “Citizens wishing to be heard,” I wondered what the evening would bring. I heard some of the familiar items: repairs are not being done, no one on the council knows anything…then I heard Davis speak about the Freedom of Information documents that he has obtained, proving that there have been exchanges of funds in return for lucrative contracts. Davis will be issuing a report on the corruption. Just before Davis approached the microphone, the city’s Corporation Counsel started to speak. The mayor “shushed” her, and Bernis Nelson left the room. I found out later that she resigned. Davis refers to the mayor’s entourage as the City “Clowncil.” It’s not difficult to see why.

Karen Watson, who was a mayoral-appointed Commissioner on the Housing Board, recently resigned in protest. I have heard her speak twice in the Common Council meetings. She looked Mayor Foster in the eye while she told her of the abuses, and called her on lies. Yes, lies. Because again, the injustice IS that blatant

Curious about this? Sherry Hinkson, AKA MsEqualRights, records these sessions and posts them on YouTube, aided by her daughter, Zakiya. To view them, click on:

http://www.youtube.com/user/MsEqualrights

Would you like to do a little more? Sign this petition, calling for a HUD investigation into the operation of the Peekskill Housing Authority and asking Governor Cuomo to look at human rights violations under Mayor Foster’s management. To sign, click on the link below or cut-and-paste it into your browser:

http://signon.org/sign/save-public-housing-in?source=c.em.mt&r_by=1684564

Removing two bad leaders will not eliminate the problems but it may open up space to attract better leaders. Then the work will begin its next phase, to improve conditions for the poor and marginalized and the people of color who are dismissed or abused. I am grateful that the individuals and groups fighting for change are in it for the long term.

Edgar J. Mouton, MEAN Co-Founder, Passes at 76

2012-06-15T07:11:00.000-05:00

Mr. Edgar Mouton speaking to Sarah Lawrence College Health Advocacy Students

I have been reluctant to write this post. Death, of course, is a part of that wheel of stress we trudge, and old men die all the time. So that's not the issue. Black men die of unnatural causes with disturbing frequency, as this blog has sometimes documented. To live to be 76 can be a blessing. But Mr. Mouton was not an ordinary man and his death probably not natural.

Edgar Mouton, co-founder of Mossville Environmental Action Now, passed away last Thursday. He was 76 years old. I only knew Mr. Mouton for four years. I met him post-Katrina (how I still count time in Louisiana) in my role as a trainer with the Environmental Support Center (also of happy memory). He had worked in the refinery zone in a number of different plants. I remember him telling me he had handled benzine and sulphuric acid. His age was a mystery to me as exposure to all those chemicals brings illnesses and conditions that wear a body away. Mr. Mouton had dedicated 30 years of his life to revealing the injustice of favoring the interests of industry over humanity. The people of Mossville were being sacrificed to our consumption and the profits of the oil and chemical industries. He worked tirelessly to hold them accountable, for federal Superfund designation for the land, owned by black folk since the end of the Civil War (another way to count time), now lost to pollution and to reclaim the health of his people.

Like most of the people I have had the privilege to work with in Mossville, Mr. Mouton had a mordant sense of humor and infinite patience. One of my last memories is of him, Dorothy Felix (MEAN's other co-founder), Wilma Subra and Sanjay Gupta of CNN being stood up by the head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. It was spring, it was hot, they wouldn't let these two elderly people into the state office building in Baton Rouge. (I suppose the CNN cameraman was a problem for them). They were standing around cracking jokes. They knew that in some fundamental way, LADEQ had already lost the war.

Goodbye Mr. Mouton. I'm happy to know you have joined the ancestors in a high, and much less toxic, place.

Too Black For Israel

2012-06-06T10:33:00.000-05:00

Guest Writer Jean Riesman

Today marks the beginning of an experiment for me with Urban Ecology. I'm pleased to announce guest writers every Friday throughout the summer. Except for this week. Jean Riesman, friend, co-conspirator in many ventures and cogent observer of the Palestinian crisis has agreed to write about a growing crisis in Israel -- racialized violence against African immigrants. She is making the first of what I hope are frequent visits to the virtual page of Urban Ecology.

Too Black for Israel
Jean Riesman
There it is – no code words, no euphemisms, but out in the cleansing desert sun of ethnic decontamination: African immigrants are too black and too not-Jewish for Israel. Declaring that all African migrants "without exception" should be expelled before the "[i]nfiltrators, along with the Palestinians,…bring a quick end to the Zionist dream," Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai put the race card down on the unvarnished table: "Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn't belong to us, the white man."

"Infiltrator" has become the standard term for African refugees and asylum-seekers, as if they were a threat to both demographic purity and national security, the underground plume of a hidden contaminant or the conspiratorial advance guard of a territorial invasion. To contain infiltration requires strategic engineering, a way to intercept the ominous flow. In Israel, the containment system under construction includes a 150-mile-long fence along the Egyptian border, a detention center for up to 11,000 detainees, a new plan for mass deportations and tent cities, a law that jails not only uncredentialed immigrants but also anyone aiding them, and explicit appeals to racism in the preservation of Israel as a white ethnographic state.

Most of the estimated pool of 62,000 exiles – many in flight from Sudan and Eritrea, paralleling the political crises in the Horn of Africa – have been smuggled across the Sinai from Egypt and then grudgingly given temporary status but, since 2010, no work permits at the Israeli border. They are bused into the country on a one-way ticket and literally dropped off into a marginal existence, often in Tel Aviv. Since the influx accelerated in 2007, about 25,000 have clustered in the lower-income neighborhoods on the city's south side, crammed into apartments where canny landlords have raised the rent on this per-capita boom in vulnerable tenants. Local Israeli Jewish residents have accused them of making their own lives intolerable, due to allegedly relentless physical and sexual assaults, robberies, and public drug and alcohol use.

The caption states: "The aftermath of a Molotov attack on a refugee's kindergarten in south Tel Aviv on April 27, 2012. Four apartments and a kindergarten were hit with Molotov cocktails during a coordinated night attack."

Such exaggerated and ill-substantiated claims of an African crime spree in Tel Aviv have prompted a recent spike in racialized violence – firebombings and riots as well as physical attacks on both Africans and their anti-racist advocates. In April, after several Eritrean men were suspected of (and later charged with) rape in a nearby parking garage, Molotov cocktails were heaved into a local kindergarten yard, and later an apartment complex. In early May, a major daily newspaper – quoting anonymous police sources – reported that "youth gangs" of African youths rove the city's beaches in search of unattended wallets and bags. In mid-May, Israel's police chief strode through south Tel Aviv's neighborhoods and blamed African migrants for a crime "surge" there, while unnamed officials maintained that 40 percent of criminal activity in greater Tel Aviv was committed by illegal immigrants. In neither case was corroborating data presented – nor when Interior Minister Yishai alleged that rapes by African men were under-reported by Israeli women who were afraid of the "stigma" of purported AIDS exposure.

Then, completing the diseased and hyper-sexualized caricature of the black male African destroying the country from within, Netanyahu issued his warning that "Israel could be overrun by African infiltrators:"

[The] phenomenon of illegal infiltrators from Africa is extremely serious and threatens Israel's social fabric and national security… [I]f we don't stop the problem, 60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Two days later, on May 22, an anti-migrant march of 1000 Jewish Israeli residents of south Tel Aviv deteriorated into a rampage, in which windows of African-owned cars and storefronts of African-owned businesses were smashed, the stores themselves looted. Black bystanders were chased and beaten (including an Ethiopian Jew to whom apologies immediately were issued after his religious allegiance was established). Anti-racist counter-demonstrators have had their placards shredded and had to be separated by police from an incensed crowd.

These physical attacks have been accompanied by vitriolic verbal assaults on the Africans themselves as well as on the anti-racist activists and refugee-advocacy organizations rallying to the migrants' support. A member of the Israeli parliament (the Knesset), from a centrist party entrenched in Netanyahu's governing coalition, asserted at the May 22 demonstration that "the Sudanese are a cancer on our body." Israeli leftists who objected to the new law that went into effect on June 3 have been labeled as "traitors." Another Knesset member – although prominent in last summer's housing protests – proposed that the human-rights activists themselves should be rounded up and sent to the massive detention camp in the Sinai desert (deliberately designed without air-conditioning).

This proposition is not as rhetorical as it may seem. Africans not considered legitimate refugees now face up to three years in prison, their advocates up to five years. Since Sunday, Netanyahu has ordered the swift deportation of Africans seen as economic opportunists. Exceptions will be made for Sudanese, Eritreans, and Somalians, who will not be returned en masse to the brutal conditions that drove their exile – instead transported out of Israel communities and into tent camps. Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein told a court last week that it is now safe to repatriate South Sudanese, despite ongoing cross-border flare-ups with Sudan.

Once the Africans are back on the Nubian side of the fence, the Palestinians are fully encircled by the West Bank separation barrier, and the human-rights activists are sweating in their cells, the dark demographic plume so threatening to Israeli identity and security apparently will be contained. And Israel's pretense of being an open democratic state will be that much more revealed.

Natural History of Vacant Lots

2012-06-04T21:42:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite books is this now out of print nature guide by Matthew Vessel and Herbert Wong. It provides expert guidance in how to explore the flora and fauna of abandoned areas in California. While many of the species differ from what we have here in Ohio, the book provides a useful orientation to the general task as well as a helpful metaphor for thinking about the disturbed place of the urban Midwest.

Disturbed places is how Vessel and Wong describe vacant lots. At the very beginning they state, "A town or city is a disturbed natural area modified drastically by humans to accommodate their own needs." At the writing of the book they could fairly state, "Most of the natural organisms that once flourished on the urban site have been pushed out by people." This is certainly not the case today, at least not in Akron, and long abandoned areas of the Great Lakes hugging rust belt.

The first time I laid eyes on the land that Pat and I would eventually own was about 10 years ago. It formed part of the eastern edge of the Towpath trail that is a part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Before that it had been one of the neighborhoods that Great Migration folk had settled upon arrival in the North. I drove slowly down Hickory St. I carefully skirted a prickle of ground hogs (yes, this is the collective noun) lounging on the asphalt. Deer roamed the places where houses had stood. Chipmunks ran amok, twitching and scurrying from hole to hole. Hawks circled. An impressive array of birds sang, hunted and raised their young. This was before eminent domain took what little housing remained standing.

N. Maple St. Tree

Now the area is disturbed again as we, and others build houses in what the city hopes will be an urban "arts district" (which is code for "Let's try to attract rich gay men". What they got, at least on our street, is middle aged lesbians). But the fact of the towpath and the federal national park renders our little part of Akron an ecotone. Ecotone is "the area where two or more distinct habitats adjoin" according to Home Ground, a wonderful volume edited by Barry Lopez, that is subtitled Language for an American Landscape. Our little habitat will never be urban chic and somewhat sterile because the 50+ mile long towpath provides an uninterrupted corridor for the migration of birds, roaming coyotes, solitary and vicious fisher cats (actually weasels) on the hunt, not to mention deer, groundhogs, crows and ... I could go on and on.

And I will, in regular installments throughout the summer as I explore the micro-environment of my wooded hillside as well the other meanings of "natural history" and "disturbed places" for what we hope will become an urban sanctuary.