Fifty-years-ago I could not enter the public library in my southern segregated hometown of Lexington, MS. Nor could I attend a high school, the facility built for the Negro students who wished to excel was called, Lexington Attendance Center. There were many basic access problems for the Negro during my childhood. Not to be thwarted by what I was forbade by laws and practices from receiving, my village lead by my parents said, “Keep studying, keep trying and we will work to make changes for you.”

Fifty-years-ago, of the stores that we were allowed to patronize, we were only allowed to hold the garment in front of our bodies, never allowed to try-on the garment. So, instead, my mother made her children’s and other females in the village their clothing. Therefore, I learned to select fabric, patterns, how to measure all parts of the body so that the garment would be a customized design and fit. Hence, my mother became to “go to” seamstress in the neighborhood.

Some years ago, while attending my oldest brother’s funeral, a lady approached me inquiring if I was Ethel’s daughter. Ethel is my mother’s name. I said, “yes”. She said, “You wouldn’t remember me. You were very young. (I look like my mother). But Ethel made all my family’s clothes.” Proudly she proclaimed while smiling, “Ethel could take scraps of different fabrics, put them together and make all of us look good.” I smiled and told her thanks, remembering how I would help my mother with the gathering, hemming and cutting of the fabric then ironing and preparing the garments for pick-up. (She was teaching me business and service in a segregated era. I use those lesions today).

Institutionalized racism was brutal and embedded in it required a resilience that mandated vital strength, courage, hope and faith that through work, effort and presentence, things would be better for the next generation. Hope and trust in the next generation is that which the folks in my village were working toward. Those freedom fighter volunteers believed that we could make an impact on the world. They had taken the risks to allow freedom meetings to be held in their homes and churches to advance the cause and saturate the thirst for a better life. In my town it was Epworth AME Church. It was the store front business on Beal Street in my hometown where the Freedom Democratic Party met.

Fannie Lou Hammer, Robert G. Clark, Medgar Evers and others would come and plan. My mother would attend the meetings offering her ideas and services and she would allow me to attend the meetings and make copies and distribute them to the leaders and volunteers. It was Saints Junior College, the African American controlled church school operated by the Church of God in Christ that made its space available for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to come, speak and raise money for the civil rights movement. I was provided an opportunity to serve and to have had a chance to talk with Dr. King as a teenager. The white lady however, Mrs. Hazel Brandon Smith, lost her newspaper business because she allowed Dr. King to stay in her guesthouse.

The white merchants subsequently, boycotted her paper refusing to place advertisement in it and she went bankrupt.
My mother would say, “I want a better life for my 10 children so that they can have access to broader opportunities beyond the farm and what we do at home.”

Moving forward, we watched the result of our work coming to pass as the civil rights legislation was authorized by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. I witness my mother crying when President Johnson signed and spoke about the legislation he had signed. “The hope that reigns from the law is a reality, now we must change the hearts of men”, she said. Well, that is taking some more time.

Holding the Civil Rights Summit in Austin is apropos as it was President Johnson who seized the power of his office to advance the nation among racial matters. In his actions, he acknowledged that the Democratic Party had lost the south for the residuals of slavery were entrenched in the economic wealth of 13 slaves states. The republican party issued a statement about the Civil Rights Summit saying, “Embedded in the Republican Party’s DNA is a history of championing civil rights. What began with its founding by abolitionists and continued through its fight for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, today lives on in leading the charge for the civil rights issue of our time: equal access to a quality education.” – Orlando Watson, RNC Communications Director for Black Media.

Regardless of how much we hope for smooth sailing post civil rights legislation passage, changing the hearts of men is a difficult and stringent process. We are living in a world were the vestiges of the past lingers and it is holding on tighter as the opposing side is fearful of losses that it may endure.

Subsequently, new laws and court cases rise to the top such as the U.S. Supreme Court decision that questions the key provision of the 1964 Voting Rights Act which was a legacy piece of legislation during the Johnson presidency that removed restrictions for African American voters that aimed to enforce the 15th Amendment of the US Constitution.

Therefore, the children of the freedom fighters and their children still has work to do, should they choose to be able to utilize the benefits gained 50 years ago. We make the decisions about the kind of world we choose to live in based upon our actions. We likewise, make the decision to leave the kind of world for future generations based upon what we do today.

May God bless and I will see you next week.

Many of us are members of various organizations. Sometimes resolutions, proposal and motions are made that frustrates us and we fail to agree with the idea of the proposal’s intended outcome.
Our first response is to say with intensity and high emotions, “I don’t like it, and I will not vote for the proposal. We say, “I will let my voice be heard by voting ‘no’.”

That is indeed the correct action, when you do not want to allow the issue to surface again. Your opinion has been duly noted with your “no” vote recorded.
Stop!

However, instead of voting “no” out of your distaste for the proposal, when you know that your action will not be on the prevailing side.

If you understand parliamentary procedure, the standard rules that governs most organizations, you will know to downsize your emotions and vote strategically by voting for the action that you do not like.

When you vote on the prevailing side of the motion that you do not like, you will have the opportunity at some future time to bring up the issue again.

An example of such has occurred at the Houston Independent School District Board of Education. No, the above description of the strategy is not the reason HISD has brought the closing of Dotson Elementary School back to the table for a second look, it is there however, because of the voting on the prevailing side rule.

What has returned the closing of Dodson Elementary School to the table has been the activism and citizen participation.

The arguments that parents and citizens are putting forth are the merits of maintaining the elementary school as a neighborhood resource rather than use it as a site for shifting uses of the school building for the District other than teaching small children.

Learning the lesson of political strategy though the use of a current event example should help as we manage our lives going forward.

Closing neighborhood schools should be a concern of all at multiple levels and layers.

It is not just about the children today. It has the safety concerns for small children walking to and from schools. It has housing value variable.

The school building and play ground is a community resource beyond teaching children and providing a play ground for the current students. It should become also used as green space for children to play and where families can fight obesity.
The list continues as far as your imagination for productive use can take you as the state law allows for public use beyond educating the children after regular classes are over.

Specific to the upcoming HISD Board meeting this week, it has
been reported that the Board of Regent who represents Dodson Elementary School is not scheduled to be present on that day of the resurging vote.

Maybe the citizens can do what they can to persuade Regent Paula Harris to change her plans and come to table to cast an affirmative vote for the children of Dodson Elementary School which also is a vote for the zoned middle school and ultimately Jack Yates High School.

Also citizens, we need to learn the difference between the words trustee and representative and gain and understanding of what the actualization of these terms mean in the electoral process.
May God bless and I will see you next week.

Through Dorris Eyes:

With March 31 as the deadline for the nation to sign-up for health care, the government and private medical firms are working trying to snag and reel in the procrastinators to attach the late comers to their company while the government just want the nation’s citizens to just register.

The health coverage for each individual is important. Having recently experienced more than 15 years of family members being ill, care givers began to establish baseline knowledge about the medical system. Yes, there are many short comings, but the knowledge of those requiring the need for such services are even greater. The public heath sector of our government need to do a better job of engaging the health consumer public on several factors:
1. prevention- identify 20 of the most common health problems and then specific spell out the ways that could possibly be prevented.

2. Warning Signs for specific medical problems and

3. Care tips for identified common health problems.

As the clock ticks on the Affordable Health Care Act registration, citizens are facing penalties if they do not self-enroll so that they will not uninsured. The minority community is not the focus of the nationwide push to get people signed-up. Special focus is on the Texas Latino community. In Texas it is estimated that there are 3.5 million Hispanics who are uninsured.

Nationally, 32 percent of Latinos are uninsured and 16 percent of the non-Latinos.

Health disparities are serious enough for all citizens to stop and focus. For these health disparites leads to illness and death. The access and use of health care services can reduce our exposure to risks. One’s behavior and also reduce the risk factors for disease along with environmental hazards and social determinants according to 2012 Center for Disease Report.

The identification of diseases and risk factors are essential to the improvement of one’s health for knowledge is power. The 2013 CDC report on Disparities Examined states that the latest report looks at disparities in deaths and illness, use of health care, behavioral risk factors for disease, environmental hazards, and social determinants of health at the national level.

This year’s report contains 10 new topics including activity limitations due to chronic diseases, asthma attacks, fatal and nonfatal work-related injuries and illnesses, health-related quality of life, periodontitis in adults, residential proximity to major highways, tuberculosis, access to healthier foods, and unemployment.

Report Supports National Disparities Elimination Efforts: The information provided in the report is of vital importance in achieving the goals of Healthy People 2020 and the National Partnership for Action (NPA) to End Health Disparities .

CDC’s report also complements the annual National Healthcare Disparities Report and the periodicreports related to Healthy People 2020. When we review the report and learn, we will become more excited about why each of us is in need of health care.

May God bless and I will see you next week.

Through Dorris’s Eyes:

On the year that the first African-American Woman Elected to Congress Joins Popular Black Heritage Stamp Series, U.S. Postal Service Honors Shirley Chisholm, the US Postal Services attempts to move the communities of the nation backward, instead of forward.

The continuous threats to close post offices located in minority neighborhood is evidence that the quality of life returns to a downward directions going back to days of the past, when African Americans neighborhoods were not provided the equal quality of service. When our nation’s service providers take one step forward then retrench to one step backward, the gains that were made are not sustainable nor do we provide access to the residents of the area.

The closing of the Southmore Post Office Station, 4110 Almeda Rd. in Houston, TX 77004 meets the needs of a growing community that is becoming a crossover again as the racial diversity increases. Yet, the predominate customer-base is African Americans and with your announcement of this closure, it become a critical matter of taking another resource from the community and the small business owners like myself.

For the past 30 years, my company and my family have relied upon the Southmore station for all my postal needs from letters to shipping to subscriptions to invoices and regular business-to-business services. This proposed closure places another strain on my small business which would require more time and fuel to get the same job accomplished that I have been doing for 30-years.

My request in this letter is to keep the Southmore Station open and find additional revenue sources that would make the location produce additional revenue and services to the community. This request joins many voices of which we have reported on as a community newspaper. It is unacceptable to merely have memories, we need services within the community that improves the quality of life for its residents.

The commemorative stamps should not become the only legacy to US Post Offices in African, poor and rural community. We the people still expect the delivery of service from the postal service. It is one of the first governmental entities that opened its public doors and grated African Americans the opportunity to move into the middle class with benefits and privileges.

America, we cannot go backward. Forward, it must be. It is essential to hear and listened to the voices of the residents by those we elect for real, not grandstanding with speeches and photo ops. We must have sound action on the floor of Congress so that we residents can get positive outcomes at home.

May God bless and I will see you next week.

Through Dorris’s Eyes:

Why should the citizenry be concerned about the closing of schools? Some citizens have not given school a thought since leaving. Others only think about schools at tax times whereas, others only think about schools when there is a problem or a major disruption that flashes repeatedly in the media.

Schools for African Americans were forbidden and inaccessible in our past, just 150 years ago. Quality schools were even more rare coming out of enslavement. When it came to measuring competencies against a national norm expectations were not there for excellence for we know why we were in such a predicament. Schools, we must understand has many purposes. It can be labeled the cornerstone of a community. When our education has told us what a cornerstone and the value of one, then we may begin to understand the core value of schools and easy access to education.

Back in the day as noted earlier, a school house was left to the black church where communities who sought to improve supported the schools thinking that through education communities would improve and therefore, the quality of life would be better for future generations.

What does an improved quality of life bring to a community without the responsibility of what to do with those individual improvements? Why should educators and parents labor in the vineyard and see no benefit or very little yield from their labor? Well, America and Houston specifically, we have a problem that has revisited itself from the past.

When young parents move into a neighborhood, realtors taut the schools in the community. Parents are actually given the “feeder” pattern for your address to the cornerstone. Parents are told the names of the elementary, middle and high school your child is zoned to attend. Realtors even tell parents that the school district even offer options for parents to opt out of sending the children to their zoned school and that they can research charter, and special academic public schools.

What parents are facing today is triple fold as it usually is for parents: limited budget, limited amount of time to stay on top of all matters relating to the children’s education and limited knowledge of the rules and regulations of the public education bureaucracy. To make the matters worse, the elected school board officials are not there to represent the needs of the families within the district form which they were elected. Why not you ask, probably in quite a perturb manner? They are elected as trustees, which means that they work to do what they feel to be in the best interest of the school district as a whole.

To be Continued Next Week Until Then…
May God bless and I will see you next week.