Aug. 31, 2014

African-American Man Killed in Syria Fighting for Islamic Militants
By Frederick H. Lowe

Douglas McAuthur McCain

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the NorthStarNews.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Douglas McAuthur McCain, a Black man from the Minneapolis, Minn., area, was killed in Syria, fighting for ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq, the White House has confirmed.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, has announced that McCain, who was born in Chicago and raised in the Minneapolis area, has died.

"We are aware of U.S. citizen Douglas McAuthur McCain's presence in Syria and can confirm his death," Hayden said in a statement Aug. 26. "We continue to use every tool we possess to disrupt and dissuade individuals from traveling abroad for violent jihad and to track and engage those who return.”

Kenyata McCain, a first cousin, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that a U.S. State Department official called Douglas McCain's mother Sunday night to tell her that her son had been killed in Syria over the weekend. His mother lives in San Diego.

The Star Tribune reported that McCain was killed in Marea, Syria, during a gun battle with members of the Free Syrian Army. McCain converted from Christianity to the Muslim faith in 2004.

Family members had recently talked to Douglas McCain, and he said he was in Turkey, which is a common route to Syria. Kenyata McCain noted that on his Facebook page that her cousin supported ISIS or ISIL, which President Barack Obama has tapped as one of the United States' top security concerns. Government officials believe more than 100 Americans have joined ISIS.

The NorthStar News & Analysis sent a request for an interview to Kenyata McCain through Facebook, but she did not respond.

NorthStar also called the U.S. State Department about McCain, but officials did not respond to its request for information, including how they determined he was an American. Several news reports said an American passport and $800 were found on his body.

Douglas McCain’s death occurred shortly after the disclosure of the beheading of American photographer James Foley by ISIS. A video of Foley's execution was released August 19.

NBC News first reported Douglas Authur McCain's death. The network attributed their information to the Free Syrian Army.

The Star Tribune reported that the 33-year-old McCain graduated in 1999 from Robbinsdale Cooper High School in New Hope, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb. Although some reports said he did not graduate.

In recent years, he moved to San Diego, where he worked as a caregiver and assisted in raising his daughter, who is nearly a year old.

Some reports described McCain as Tunisian and Egyptian, but he said on his Facebook page that he was 10 percent African American. While in Chicago, he lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, a giant public housing project on the South Side. The complex has since been demolished.

His Facebook page has been taken down.

August 31, 2014

Remembering the Katrina Memorial That Almost Wasn’t
By Mary LaCoste

During a special anniversary ceremony, Mayor Mitch Landrieu remembers Hurricane Katrina in front of the Katrina Memorial last week. PHOTO: NOLA.gov/Facebook

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Louisiana Weekly

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Within the old Charity Hospital Cemetery, and visible from Canal Street in New Orleans, La.,  is a little-known memorial dedicated to those who lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina. It is also the final resting place of 86 bodies that remained unclaimed after the storm, almost half of them unidentified. Well-designed, inspirational and lovely, the memorial is nestled among the dozen cemeteries clustered at the end of the Canal Streetcar Line. It is a memorial that almost did not happen.

The fact that it became a reality on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2008, was due to the perseverance of many people and an extraordinary final push to completion by the city’s funeral directors and the coroner. They deemed it inappropriate to let the bodies remain any longer in a warehouse. They cared.

One million dollars of FEMA money had been set aside by the city for a suitable memorial and for the burial of unclaimed bodies. Nothing happened until encouragement came in the form of donations including one of $100,000 from the Funeral Service Foundation, an arm of the National Funeral Directors Association. The African-American funeral directors of New Orleans, impatient and unhappy with the delays, took the lead in securing more funds and demanding action. Matthews International Corporation was contacted to design a suitable memorial, secure local input and order materials.

Work began in earnest in May 2008, less than three months before the target date of August 29. Much had to be done. The land in the front portions of the old Charity Hospital Cemetery, which has long served as a potters’ field, was carefully cleared and permits sought and granted. Monies had to be set aside to provide for future upkeep by Louisiana State University, the titleholder of the land.

Six mausoleum-like structures were completed and landscaping begun. A monument symbolizing the eye of the storm was the centerpiece of the design with walks curving out from it like the paths of encircling hurricane winds. Despite all obstacles, it looked as if it would be completed and the dedication would be held on time. As the date neared, Scott Anthony of the Funeral Service Foundation flew in from New York to take part in the ceremonies. He was proud of the role funeral directors from across the United States had played by their support.

Hearses, more than 60 of them, were loaned, free of cost, by funeral homes in and near New Orleans. Men and women from the funeral industry volunteered to drive the vehicles and act as pallbearers to carry the sealed metal coffins into the memorial cemetery. Arrangements were made for speakers, a jazz funeral procession and for the ringing of bells at the exact time of the first canal break at 9:38 am. Reporters from the national and local press were alerted.

Disaster! By August 28, Hurricane Gustav was in the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans was in the projected path! Evacuations had begun. Citizens, their emotions still raw from the terrors of Katrina, were leaving in droves. Would the August 29 dedication have to be cancelled? The planners would not let that happen. Led by the dedicated ladies of the funeral industry, such as Sandra Rhodes Duncan and C.C. Johnson, they pulled it together with some minor changes and an abbreviated jazz procession.

At the memorial site on August 29, the bells did ring at 9:28, echoing faint sounds of ringing across the city. Mayor Ray Nagin led the gathering in prayer as the last bodies were put into place to the sound of Ken Ferdinand’s trumpet playing “Amazing Grace.” There was a soul-stirring hymn sung by Jonti Short and an impromptu trumpet performance by Coroner Frank Minyard as those in the gathering dried tears from their eyes.

Louis Charbonnet remembers the long solemn line of hearses that transported the bodies from the storage warehouse to the memorial, the last one a glass-sided hearse, the kind used in jazz funerals. A rose was placed on each casket as it was interred. The once-neglected remains were, at last, treated with dignity.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honoré was there to address the gathering that included a few members of the general public, religious and political figures, donors as well as the funeral professionals, now relieved that their job was done. One donor was able to return home just before the airport closed in advance of the expected hurricane.

It was expected that the dedication would have full national as well as local coverage, but there was almost none. Reporters had bigger stories to follow. For several days all focus would be on the new hurricane threat. The memorial dedication that should have been front-page news was overlooked, then forgotten — even when Hurricane Gustav went elsewhere. That is why, today, so few New Orleanians know of the existence of the graves or of the beautiful Katrina memorial.

The Katrina Memorial is indeed impressive. Weeks after the dedication, the planned walkway and landscaping were completed. Some say the walkway design reminds them of a labyrinth inviting visitors to stroll and to meditate. The six rectangular structures containing the crypts are faced with black granite that reflects the occasional visitor following the pathways. The large granite stone rising from the “eye” of the hurricane is inscribed with words of inspiration and explanation. Other markers identify the funeral directors and others who played parts in planning the memorial and seeing that it became a reality.

The Katrina Memorial is a suitable place to meditate and remember the terrible losses of the storm. It remains open each day to anyone who cares to reach in and unlatch the iron gates to the Charity Hospital Cemetery on Canal Street and walk a few feet into the past.

Report: Progress for Back Men Stalled

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - From the U. S. president to millionaire athletes, these appear to be halcyon days for Black men.

Forty years ago, only a fiction writer could imagine that the nation’s leader would ever be a person of color or that a Fortune 500 company like American Express would ever consider having a Black chief executive.

Today, the growth of Black elected officials and decision-makers shows the remarkable advances that Black men have made in government as well as in business, science, sports, education, entertainment and a host of other areas.

But dig deeper into the statistics for Average Joes, and the picture is of stalled progress overall.

Soaring incarceration rates in the past 25 years and the surge in unemployment during the Great Recession have left Black men, in general, still clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder, the same place they were in 1974 and earlier, according to a new report by researchers at the University of Chicago.

Derek Neal and Armin Rick, the co-authors of the report, found that so-called reforms in the criminal justice system have stifled the general advance of Black males and made them more vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment.

Education is a prime example. By 1989, 25 years after passage of the door-opening Civil Rights Act, Black men were rapidly closing the gap with White in completed years of schooling.

Instead of the four-year difference of the 1960s and 1970s, Black adults ages 26 to 35 had by 1989, on average, completed just one year less of school than their White counterparts, while record numbers of Black high school graduates were enrolling in college, technical schools and other higher education training.

However, the impact of increased incarceration has changed the picture. Between 1989 and 2014, the gap in Black-White educational attainment has stopped shrinking and instead widened to nearly 1970s levels, the two researchers found.

They cited continuing wide Black-White differences in math and reading scores on standardized and college placement tests as well as the widening gap in educational attainment.

The rise in incarceration also correlates with lowered employment rates for Black men, particularly since 2008, the researchers found: “Relative to white men in the labor market, black men are in no better a situation than they were in 1974.”

Incarceration is the key factor, the report found. Prisoner numbers have soared in the wake of federal and state policies imposed in the 1980s and 1990s to crack down on crime, including parole abolition, enhanced sentencing guidelines ad three-strike laws that ensure near lifetime imprisonment for repeat offenders.

The report states such policy changes – fueled by grants for prison building – accounted for more than 70 percent of the growth in the prison population between 1986 and 2006. The United States now leads the world in locking up people, with 2.2 million behind bars.

Not surprisingly, Black men have been affected the most, the study noted. Given historical patterns of discrimination, they remain more likely to be arrested, to be convicted and to be sentenced to longer terms than White men.

Combined, local jails and state and federal prisons today house close to a million Black men. Overall, one in four Black males are behind bars or on probation or parole on any given day, according to this report and other studies.

The higher arrest rates, the report stated, are reflected in labor market data. The data show Black men age 21 and over have the highest rate of unemployment among all able-bodied adults.

According to the Labor Department, the most recent data show the unemployment rate for Black men was 10.9 percent compared to 4.9 percent for White men. (Black women, too, have nearly double the unemployment rate of White women, 9 percent to 4.8 percent.)

The picture could change in coming years, the report indicated. The decline in crime rates plus the Great Recession appear to be forcing the debt-ridden federal government and cash-strapped states to re-examine costly prison policies, the report noted.

Now the federal government and states are looking for ways to reduce prison costs by promoting diversion programs, potentially leading to lower incarceration rates down the road. Still, the impact of those policies will continue to be felt for years on the success rates for Black children and adults, the report concluding.

Thanks. Please be sure to credit Lawrence Bryant/St. Louis American