Saturday, January 15, 2011

Oldest African-American dies at 113

By Phil Gast, CNN

January 15, 2011 7:42 p.m. EST

Mississippi Winn, who died Friday in Shreveport, Louisiana, never married and lived independently until 103.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Mississippi Winn died Friday at age 113
Her parents were apparently born into slavery
She was independent until 10 years ago
Shreveport, Louisiana, has begun to honor her each year

(CNN) -- Mississippi Winn didn't get caught up in the amazing statistics that accompanied someone her age.

Only 1 in 5 million people in the industrialized world live to be 110. About 60 people that age live in the United States, with another 300 or so scattered around the globe. Nine of 10 are women.

Winn was believed to be the oldest living African-American when she died Friday afternoon in Shreveport, Louisiana, at 113.

Investigator Milton Carroll of the Caddo Parish Coroner's Office said he was not permitted to disclose a cause of death, but a relative said Winn -- who was nicknamed "Sweetie" -- had been in declining health since last autumn.

Robert Young, a senior claims researcher with the Gerontology Research Group and a senior consultant for Guinness World Records, visited Winn at Magnolia Manor Nursing Home in July 2010.

"She looked to be in very good shape," he said Saturday. "It was a surprise she went downhill so fast."

Young believes Winn's parents were born into slavery. Her father was born in 1844 and her mother in 1860.

But Winn "never discussed it," said her great-niece Mary C. Hollins of Shreveport. "She would say, 'I don't know about that.'"

Winn, who did not marry and lived independently until 103, appears to have lived a life that made her especially well-qualified for the elite club of supercentenarians -- those who live to be 110 or older.

We have declared March 31 as Ms. Mississippi Winn Day since her 110th birthday.
--Cedric Glover, Shreveport, Louisiana mayor

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"She had always been kind to others," Hollins said on Saturday. "She was always respectful."

Shreveport Mayor Cedric Glover said the city has honored several centenarians.

"We have declared March 31 as Ms. Mississippi Winn Day since her 110th birthday," he wrote in an e-mail.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with Miss Winn's family, relatives, her beloved Pastor Clarence Hicks and her church family and friends who all loved and cherished her," he said.

The secret to living to and past 110, besides not having an unhealthy weight, said Young, is a positive attitude and emotional and physical stability. Most supercentenarians take little medication during their lives, he said.

"They do things in moderation," he said. "They don't get upset."

Most were still walking at age 105, he added.

Born in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, on March 31, 1897, Winn moved with her family to Shreveport after her father died in 1908.

One of 15 children, eight of whom lived to adulthood, Winn had a sister who lived to be 100 and a brother who lived to 95.

She worked as a domestic, cooking and helping families raise children.

She worked in Kansas City for a time and lived in Seattle, Washington, from 1957 to 1975, helping to raise three boys, before returning to Louisiana. Winn had a child who died at age 2, Hollins said.

Before she moved to the nursing home, Winn lived on her own, doing her own laundry and walking around a track for exercise. She never learned to drive. Instead, she got rides or took a bus to the grocery store.

She liked bingo and sewing and loved to cook vegetables and stewed chicken. Said Hollins: "She didn't make much over modern things."

Winn was clear about what she liked.

"She was a disciplinarian," said Hollins. Right or wrong, it was her way."

A member of Avenue Baptist Church, Winn received visits from church members and was able to attend a service on August 29. The chuch will hold her funeral next Saturday.

She outlived many of her church friends.

"When each one passed I could see part of her leaving with them," said Hollins, whose grandmother was Winn's sister.

In time, Winn came to enjoy the attention paid to her age.

But she remained even-keeled, said Hollins, recalling what her great-aunt would say.

"I'm just going to stay here until he's ready for me."

The oldest known African-American is now Mamie Rearden of Edgefield, South Carolina, who is 112.

The world's oldest known living person is Eunice Sanborn, 114, of Jacksonville, Texas, according to Young.

Halle Berry Playing Aretha Franklin In Biopic

Halle Berry is going to R-E-S-P-E-C-T Aretha Franklin's wishes -- the singer confirms Berry will be playing her in an upcoming biopic.

Franklin broke the news on the 'Wendy Williams Show' on Thursday, saying that after years of potential deals, the film about her illustrious life is finally getting made.

"For the last four years, we've been talking about [the film], and I have had a number of offers. Unfortunately, they were not good offers," she told the host (via MTV). "Now, we have something on the table. They have all of the financing on one project and the second project, and he's in the process of writing things for me to approve on the tele-film."

This is a wish come true for Franklin. In September, she announced that she wanted the Oscar-winner Berry to play her on film, the script for which she was reading at the time.

This is much happier news than what Franklin has had reported about her lately. She spent December in emergency surgeries, fighting a mysterious illness. Now fully healthy, she's remaining vague about the troubles, though she insists she did not have pancreatic cancer, like some sources reported.

90 girls at Memphis High School are now pregnant or have had a baby this school year

By Jamel Major - bio | email | Facebook

MEMPHIS, TN (WMC-TV) - As Memphis City Schools leaders discuss the best way to deal with the crisis at Frayser High School, one young student is dealing with parenthood.

The Action News 5 Investigators recently discovered 90 girls who attend Frayser High School are now pregnant or have already had a baby this school year.

Frayser is in Memphis City School Board member Stephanie Gatewood's district. She said a former principal of the school first sounded the alarm about the issue about a year ago.

Sources told Action News 5 there is a massive initiative in the works dedicated to preventing teen pregnancy in the Frayser community. The initiative will include after-school and in-school programs funded with grant money and run by a local nonprofit that already does some work for city schools.

Gatewood said there are programs right now to help students.

"Noting that our young ladies absolutely did not get pregnant in the hallways of our schools," said Gatewood. "So while everything that happens in our communities, it just spills over into our schools. Now we as a community have to deal with them."

Greenwood said the school board has implemented some plans to help children who are already parents or are about to become parents.

Meanwhile, Terrika Sutton is getting used to the challenges of being a teen mom.

Sutton's two-month-old daughter, Camiya, keeps the 16-year-old Frayser High School student busy.

"In the morning time, she'll wake me up about 5:00, and I'll get up and find me something to wear to school," said Sutton. "I'll get her dressed, and if she has to go somewhere, her daddy keeps her sometimes and I'll get ready for school."

Sutton said she was five months along when she found out she was pregnant. Her parents and classmates were stunned.

"They were like, 'Terrika, I never knew you would get pregnant,'" she said. "I was like, 'well, it happened.'"

Roughly 20 percent of the female student population at Frayser High is already experiencing the trials of parenthood.

"It's a shame that all these girls at Frayser are pregnant, but it ain't nothing new," said Sutton. "Some girls just try to do it because they think it's cute. For some, it's an accident."

Sutton said she believes some girls are making agreements with each other to get pregnant.

"They probably plan it," she said. "Plan what they're going to do to get pregnant. No telling."

Sutton said educators need to do more to try to help prevent teen pregnancies.

"They need a class where they can teach the girls before they get pregnant to use protection and stuff," said Sutton. "And don't try to get pregnant."

Friday, January 14, 2011

President Obama Speech at Tucson, AZ Memorial Service

Broad Racial Disparities Seen in Americans’ Ills

White people in the United States die of drug overdoses more often than other ethnic groups. Black people are hit proportionately harder by AIDS, strokes and heart disease. And American Indians are more likely to die in car crashes.

To shed more light on the ills of America’s poor — and occasionally its rich — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday releasedits first report detailing racial disparities in a broad array of health problems.

While some are well known, others have had little attention; there were also a few surprises.

The agency did not delve into why suffering is so disproportionate, other than to note the obvious: that the poor, the uninsured and the less educated tend to live shorter, sicker lives. (Some illnesses were also broken down by income level, region, age or sex, but the main focus was on racial differences.)

“Some of the figures, like the suicide rate for young American Indians, are just heartbreaking,” said Dr.Thomas R. Frieden, the C.D.C. director, who ordered the report compiled.

He acted, he said, after promising at his agency’s African American History Month celebration last February that he would do so.

“We wanted to shine a spotlight on the problem and some potential solutions,” he said.

Many of the differences are large and striking:

¶Babies born to black women are up to three times as likely to die in infancy as those born to women of other races.

¶American Indians and Alaska Natives are twice as likely to die in car crashes as any other group.

¶More than 80 percent of all suicides are committed by whites, but young American Indian adults have the highest suicide rates by far — 25 per 100,000 population at age 21, compared with 14 for whites, 10 for blacks and 8 for Asians and Hispanics.

¶Overdoses of prescription drugs now kill more Americans than overdoses of illegal drugs, the opposite of the pattern 20 years ago. Overdose death rates are now higher among whites than blacks; that trend switched in 2002, after doctors began prescribing more powerful painkillers, antidepressants and antipsychotics — more easily obtained by people with health insurance.

¶Blacks die of heart disease much more commonly than whites, and die younger, despite the availability of cheap prevention measures like weight loss, exercise, blood-pressure andcholesterol drugs, and aspirin. The same is true for strokes.

¶High blood pressure is twice as common among blacks as whites, but the group with the least success in controlling it is Mexican-Americans.

¶Compared with whites, blacks have double the rate of “preventable hospitalizations,” which cost about $7 billion a year.

¶People in Utah, Connecticut and North Dakota report the most “healthy days” per month — about 22. People in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee report the fewest, about 17.

¶Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians, whether gay or straight, all have higher rates of new infection with the AIDS virus than whites, and the situation is getting worse for blacks and Indians. Asians have the lowest rate.

¶Binge drinking — defined as five drinks at a sitting for men and four for women — is increasing. In a switch from the norm for health problems, it is more common among the better-educated and more affluent, including college students. But poor people, and especially American Indians, drink much more heavily when on binges.

¶Teenage pregnancy is holding steady or falling for all ethnic groups, but is still three times as common among Hispanic girls as among white girls, and more than twice as common among black girls as among whites.

Dr. Frieden said the purpose of the report was not to nudge the White House or Congress to take any particular action. But said that two relatively new laws had greatly improved the nation’s health and narrowed the racial gaps.

One was the 1994 Vaccines for Children program, which pays for poor children’s immunizations. The second was the earned-income tax credit, which motivates poor people to find jobs. It was first passed by Congress in 1975 but was strengthened several times, and some states and cities have created their own.

Martin Luther King memorial to open August 28

By Karin Zeitvogel (AFP) – 17 hours ago

WASHINGTON — In between memorials to two presidents and a stone's throw from a site for World War II soldiers, Washington stands to get a new memorial honoring slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

The 120-million-dollar memorial was still a building site Thursday when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Representative Eleanor Holmes-Norton and Washington Mayor Vincent Gray took an inspection tour to see how construction was progressing on the site, which has been dogged by delays.

Broken pieces of lumber lay piled near the polished stone wall on which 15 of King's quotes will be inscribed.

The centerpiece 28-foot (8.5-meter) statue of King was in place, gazing across the waters of the Tidal Basin to the memorial to president Thomas Jefferson, but obscured from photographers' lenses by scaffolding and mesh webbing.

"They want to 'keep' it until the official inauguration of the site on August 28th," said an official connected to the memorial, asking not to be named.

Thousands of people are expected to turn out for the inauguration of the memorial, which will fall on the 47th anniversary of the day King gave his renowned "I have a dream" speech on the National Mall in Washington.

Exactly three years before on August 28, 2008, Barack Obama was formally set on the path to the White House, when he won the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

The King memorial had been set to open in early 2009 but was delayed by everything from bickering over security at the site to the economic meltdown in Greece, which forced the EU shipping nation to stall on a pledge to transport the statue free of charge from China to the US capital.

The 159 pieces of the statue eventually arrived in August last year and have been put together on the memorial site.

The fact that the statue was carved out of white granite by Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin also sparked controversy, with US masons complaining that there were "plenty of unemployed" in their ranks who would have liked to work on the statue.

But on Thursday, the teething pains had been forgotten as the visiting officials and Harry Johnson, head of the foundation tasked with building the memorial, looked to what the site would represent when it finally opens.

When that day comes, visitors will enter the memorial site through a gap between two huge white stones.

The stone taken out of the mound of stone to make the gap is set from the entry portal, and on the side of that stone facing the Tidal Basin is the towering statue of a gigantic figure in US history, Martin Luther King Jr.

Johnson called the entry portal the "mountain of despair" and the stone with King's likeness carved into it the "stone of hope," both references to the civil rights leader's saying: "With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."

King championed nonviolence and direct action as methods to achieve social change, leading the Montgomery bus boycott in the 1950s in segregated Alabama and mass protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act a year later.

King was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee in April 1968. The 1964 Nobel peace prize winner was just 39 years old.

Pentagon Official: King Would Support Iraq, Afghan Wars

First Posted: 01-14-11 11:46 AM | Updated: 01-14-11 11:46 AM

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WASHINGTON -- Although the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is best remembered by the American public for fighting against racial discrimination, he was also an outspoken opponent of war and violence, most notably of the war in Vietnam. A top Obama administration official at the Department of Defense, however, argued Thursday that if King were alive, he would support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At a Pentagon commemoration of King's accomplishments, DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson said that today's wars are in line with the reverend's teachings.

"I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack," Johnson said. "Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness -- the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968."

In April 1967, King spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War in a landmark speech at Riverside Church in New York City, criticizing the large amounts of money the United States was spending on fighting rather than taking care of its citizens domestically:

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. [...]
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Salon's Justin Elliott wrote that while it's impossible to know what King would think of today's wars, this speech "strongly suggests that he would be an opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, for that matter, the secret wars in Yemen and Pakistan."

WATCH:

King's widow, Coretta Scott King, was an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq before her death in 2006. "She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a major figure in the civil rights movement who knew King. "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there areweapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."

U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $1 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States could build 20 schools with the cost of funding one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year, according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

The Pentagon did not return a request for comment.