A MARYLAND TEACHER’S UNION ENDORSES JEALOUS FOR GOV.
PHOTO COURTESY OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON (AP) – A Maryland gubernatorial candidate has picked up the endorsement of the state’s largest teachers union. The Washington Post reports former NAACP president Ben Jealous received the support from the Maryland State Education Association, which is one of the most coveted in Democratic politics. Jealous received 85 percent of the vote from more than 300 delegates during the union’s Spring Representative Assembly on Saturday. Jealous has called for increasing teacher salaries and ensuring all school staff make a living wage, among other things. The union plans to hold an event this week to formally announce the endorsement. Jealous has won several endorsements including from U.S. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) along with Maryland Working Families and Our Revolution. The Maryland primary is June 26.
STATUE OF DOCTOR WHO OPERATED ON ENSLAVED WOMEN TO BE MOVED
NEW YORK (AP) – New York City’s Public Design Commission has approved the removal of a controversial statue of a 19th century doctor who operated on enslaved women. The commission on Monday voted 7-0 to accept a mayoral panel’s recommendation that a Central Park statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims be moved to the Brooklyn cemetery where he is buried. Officials say the statue will be moved to Green-Wood Cemetery on Tuesday. Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio created the task force following nationwide protests over confederate statues. The panel recommended that most statues, accept for Sims, be kept where they are with historical markers added to give additional context. Sims was known as the father of modern gynecology. But critics say his use of enslaved African-American women as experimental subjects was unethical.
COMMERCIAL AND CRITICAL DARLING KENDRICK LAMAR WINS PULITZER
NEW YORK (AP) – Kendrick Lamar won he Pulitzer Prize for music Monday, making history as the first non-classical or jazz artist to win the prestigious prize. The revered rapper is also the most commercially successful musician to receive the award, usually reserved for critically acclaimed classical acts who don’t live on the pop charts. The 30-year-old won the prize for “DAMN.,” his raw and powerful Grammy-winning album. The Pulitzer board said Monday the album is “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” He will win $15,000. Lamar has been lauded for his deep lyrical content, politically charged live performances, and his profound mix of hip-hop, spoken word, jazz, soul, funk, poetry and African sounds. Since emerging on the music scene with the 2011 album “Section.80,” he has achieved the perfect mix of commercial appeal and critical respect. The Pulitzer board has awarded special honors to Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Hank Williams, but a popular figure like Lamar has never won the prize for music. In 1997, Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz act to win the Pulitzer Prize for music.
BEYONCE GIVES $100,000 TO 4 HISTORICALLY BLACK SCHOOLS
NEW YORK (AP) – Beyonce paid tribute to historically black colleges during her groundbreaking Coachella performance, and now the singer is donating $100,000 to four black universities. The superstar singer announced Monday the Homecoming Scholars Award Program for the 2018-2019 academic year through her Bey GOOD initiative. She plans to give $25,000 each to Tuskegee University, Bethune-Cookman University, Xavier University of Louisiana and Wilberforce University. One student from each school will receive the scholarship money. Beyonce’s Coachella festival set was critically acclaimed, as Beyonce paid tribute to the marching bands, the dance troupes and step teams at historically black colleges. Last year, the singer launched the Formation Scholars Awards Program, supporting creative and bold young women, in celebration of the one-year anniversary of her “Lemonade” album.
AFRICAN AMERICAN FEMALE BREWER FINDS HER ‘RHYTHM’
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) – As the owner of Alisa’s House of Salsa on Whalley Avenue in New Haven, Alisa Bowens-Mercado has rhythm. Now she has put that into making beer. Bowens Mercado is the first African-American woman in Connecticut to brew beer and one of only a handful across the country. As the owner of Rhythm Brewing Co., she created the unfiltered lager, Rhythm, at Overshores Brewery in East Haven, celebrating her second canning day Friday. “Getting into this really is a passion,” Bowens-Mercado said. She’s diversifying the industry as one of the few women and few people of color brew craft beer anywhere in the U.S. “I’m tapping into a national thirst of what the craft beer industry is lacking.” When the canning and labeling begins, Bowens-Mercado turns up Gloria Estefan’s “Rhythm is Gonna Get You” for good luck. And it’s working, she said.
STARBUCKS CEO APOLOGIZES TO 2 BLACK MEN ARRESTED
PHILADELPHIA (AP) – The CEO of Starbucks Corp. personally apologized to two black men who were arrested while sitting inside one of the chain’s coffee shops in Philadelphia, an incident that prompted accusations of racism on social media crimination or racial profiling,” Chief executive Kevin th the men to offer a “face-to-face apology.”
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