WEEK IN REVIEW, March 16-23 2007


Rep. Major R. Owens the former US House Rep. for NY's 11th District. was a member of the Education and the Workforce Committee. Rep. Owens also served on the Government Reform Committee. He wrote and editorial titled The Farm Subsidy Ripoff: A Test for the CBC

8,000 dollars is the maximum TANF subsidy that a family of four fortunate enough to live in a state with humane welfare policies can expect. 265,000 dollars is the limit that was proposed for each farmer as a cap for farm crop subsidies; however, this amendment was defeated in the 109th Congress on the floor of the House and there is presently no cut-off amount for the give-away to farmers.
During the brief period when some urban grassroots agencies were awarded federal community action grants the employees were often smeared as "poverty pimps"; however, a really deeply entrenched and enduring pimping system can be found in the elaborate structure of credit committees and old boy clubs under the sponsorship of the Department of Agriculture spread throughout the South, Midwest and West.

8,000 dollars is the maximum TANF subsidy that a family of four fortunate enough to live in a state with humane welfare policies can expect. 265,000 dollars is the limit that was proposed for each farmer as a cap for farm crop subsidies; however, this amendment was defeated in the 109th Congress on the floor of the House and there is presently no cut-off amount for the give-away to farmers.
In coordination with the payoffs to their Washington protection infrastructure this tiny constituency occupying less than thirty congressional districts is now mobilized for a renewal of the gravy train authorization. Reason and justice will not prevail unless the representatives of victimized taxpayers assume a counter-attacking posture and hold the line. CBC members represent families who are twice assaulted by the agriculture-industry complex greed. The bully farm lobbyists drain vital dollars away from safety net needs and also force urban dwellers to pay higher prices for food.

Irrational and emotional rhetoric lavishly applied by the Blue Dog Coalition members should be expected by C-Span viewers. Some of Washington's most convoluted logic will be on display by this powerful group which appears to promote government frugality by demonizing children on welfare while it fiercely fights for endless free lunches for agri-business fat cats. In the last congress CBC members from several southern states felt duty bound to support subsidy farm quotas since a few minority farmsteads may benefit. A simple survey, however, will expose the fact that no significant number of Blacks or poor farmers still participates in the division of the loot.

Read the whole editorial by Major Owens.

CULTURE

Ethnic Philanthropy & the Younger Generation

The Pathways study found that there are differences in giving among ethnic groups. African Americans give more to their churches, Latinos to community-based organizations, and Asian Americans to ethnic cultural institutions. What struck me most about the study, however, is that the major difference the researchers identified is between younger and older donors. Older donors, regardless of ethnicity, focused more on their own ethnicities. Younger donors (those under 40) think more broadly about community, and are less constrained by race and ethnicity. Instead of giving to a program that provides scholarships for their particular ethnic group, for example, they are more likely to give to a program that provided educational opportunities to children across a wide spectrum.

This generation gap among ethnic donors raises important implications for fundraisers. Donors who are under 40 now will no doubt be receiving a major portion of that $41 trillion transfer of wealth, at growing levels over the next few decades. As younger donors act differently in their giving than older donors, it is in a nonprofit’s best interest to expend considerable energy on creating messages that will inspire both generations.

In their continued strong push to get more Minorities to vote for the GOP, Georgia Republicans (with a few Dixiecrats) voted to off Thursday on a plan to create a Confederate heritage month, even as legislative leaders reacted coolly to a push to apologize for the state's role in slavery.

Sen. Jeff Mullis' bill would dub April as Confederate History and Heritage Month to honor the memory of the Confederacy and "all those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause of Southern Independence."
The unanimous vote by the Senate Rules committee — which sent the plan on to the full Senate for consideration — comes days after black lawmakers announced plans to ask the state to officially apologize for its role in slavery and segregation-era laws.
Mullis, a Republican, said his bill was not a response to the slavery-apology movement.
"I'm from Chickamauga, so it seemed pretty appropriate for me to do something to commemorate the War Between the States," Mullis said. His family owned land at the site of the Battle of Chickamauga, the Civil War's second-bloodiest battle and the South's last major victory.

When I grew up and went to public school, I learned about the case of Emit Till, a young Black Man beaten to death for whistling at a White Women. I didn't realize I needed teachers protected by Unions to learn that this case helped touch of the Civil Rights movement. I was wrong because this story can't be taught in certain California charter schools, where it is seen as a case of Sexual Harassment. From the LA Times

Administrators at a Los Angeles charter school forbade students from reciting a poem about civil rights icon Emmett Till during a Black History Month program recently, saying his story was unsuitable for an assembly of young children.
Teachers and students said the administration suggested that the Till case — in which the teenager was beaten to death in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman — was not fitting for a program intended to be celebratory, and that Till's actions could be viewed as sexual harassment.
The decision by Celerity Nascent Charter School leaders roiled the southwest Los Angeles campus and led to the firing of seventh-grade teacher Marisol Alba and math teacher Sean Strauss, who had signed one of several letters of protest written by the students.
The incident highlights the tenuous job security for mostly nonunion teachers in charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run. California has more than 600 charter schools, and their ranks continue to swell. According to the California Teachers Assn., staff at fewer than 10% of charter schools are represented by unions. ..Alba said that when the principal informed the class that they could not recite their poem, she gave the example of a construction worker whistling at her as she walked down the street.
"She said that she would be offended by that and that what Emmett Till did could be considered sexual harassment," said Alba. "She used the phrase a couple of times and when I objected, she said 'OK, inappropriately whistled at a woman.' "
Many parents said their children affirmed that account. Marcia Alston, mother of a seventh-grader, called the school to say she was appalled at its interpretation of history and the treatment of the teachers. She said that in the conversation, the principal used the term "rude" to describe Till's actions.
"Mr. Strauss and Ms. Alba were excellent teachers," said Alston. "The fact that they and the students had signed a letter, I thought, was good; it was something they were passionate about and it could be used as a learning tool."
Verna Hampton, whose daughter was in Alba's homeroom and signed a letter, said she was especially offended that the incident occurred during Black History Month. Hampton said her daughter told her there was nothing offensive in the letter she signed.

Mos Def led off the spring American Songbook season at the Lincoln Center his socially conscious hip hop is the best out there.

Mos Def led off the spring American Songbook season with a concert that took the series as far from the antiquarian preservationism of Jonathan Schwartz as Mos Def has taken himself from You Take the Kids. When Mos Def first began acting, playing variations on the Dickensian cliché of the devilishly cute little street tough on various series and made-for-TV movies (working then under the stage name Dante Bezé), he was already experimenting with music at home, making up his own words to records by 1980s rappers such as Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, and De La Soul. "They happened together," he later said of the dual interests he has sustained throughout his career. "I started rhyming when I was nine years old, and I caught the [acting] bug in [elementary] school, so there's no separation to the genesis of all this." As an actor, he grew up on camera in both senses of the phrase, maturing to handle better and better roles in films, including Bamboozled, Monster's Ball, and The Italian Job, as well as on Broadway, in Topdog/Underdog. As a musician, too, he has shown a drive to set new challenges and meet higher standards with each of the four CDs he has recorded since 1998.
The first, the collaboration Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star, was most striking for its cynical take on the violence and posturing in hip-hop culture, though its beats and aural textures were typical for the day. His debut solo album, Black on Both Sides, released the following year, built on Mos Def's now-established strength as a lyricist with a compelling bravura rooted not in material conquest but in racial pride. Then, in 2004, came The New Danger, Mos Def's breakthrough as a musical artist. Picking up where the black-rock movement of the 1980s left off, he constructed a hybrid of hard rock, funk, and hip-hop--power chords, dance beats, and rap. Here and there between rhymes, he did a bit of singing--crowing, more like, in a scratchy tenor, but in tune or close enough, and with a palpable exhilaration in the making of unusual music. A follow-up in this vein, True Magic, was released last December, though Mos Def was already working on a greater breakthrough, experimenting in low-profile performances with ideas that took full form at Lincoln Center in January.
* * *
That concert was held in the Allen Room, a nightclubbish theater in the cheesy mall complex that houses Jazz at Lincoln Center. The space has a stunning view of Central Park South through a floor-to-ceiling glass wall behind the stage, and the scenery served well as a diversion as the show opened with a quartet (piano, electric bass, drums, and alto sax) repeating a one-chord funk pattern for several minutes. Just as the trees and the traffic lights began to lose their interest, the sound of a New Orleansstyle brass band blurted from the back of the room, and Mos Def marched the band down the aisles toward the stage. A gimmicky entrance, probably old stuff already at the turn of the last century, it always thrills. Mos Def took the center of the stage, dressed in perfectly weathered jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie, flanked by the eight players of the brass band standing in an arc, and he began to sing--well, with fervor, to what took shape as a variation on Nina Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You."
Then things got interesting. After singing a couple of verses, Mos Def switched to rapping over "I Put a Spell on You," improvising twists on the song's original lyrics interspersed with lines of his own. The piece set the scheme for the evening, an amalgam of jazz, pop, funk, and hip-hop, with bits of rock--essentially, the history of black music in America in one night. Only Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn tried something more outlandish with their number "The History of Jazz in Three Minutes," and that was meant as a novelty. Mos Def was not joking here. He is charming and good at clowning between songs--at one point, he looked behind the stage and said, "I feel like Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate!"--but in his music, he tends to be serious to the brink of solemnity.
"This is the American Songbook series," he reminded the audience. "So I have to do some American songs. I know some American songs." The drummer and bassist laid a funk pattern out for him, and Mos Def started to croon "America" ("My Country, 'Tis of Thee"), singing through the line "Land where my fathers died," which he repeated several times, emphatically. He rapped a bit and drifted into "The Star-Spangled Banner," picking up the anthem with the couplet "And the rockets' red glare/The bombs bursting in air," and he repeated that--and repeated it, louder each time, as the brass band countered the phrase with a terse, dissonant riff. With a bit too heavy a hand, perhaps, Mos Def made a musical collage of images heavily loaded, in every way, to take on America of the past and the present.

All the talk about Obama has generated (finally in my opinion) a lot of talk about Immigrant Blacks. Like this one
Black immigrants, the invisible model

DO AFRICAN immigrants make the smartest Americans? If you were judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of evidence to back it up. In a side-by-side comparison of 2000 census data by sociologist John Logan at the Mumford Center, State University of New York at Albany, black immigrants from Africa average the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, including whites and Asians.
For example, 43.8 percent of African immigrants had achieved a college degree, compared to 42.5 of Asian Americans, 28.9 percent for immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population.
That defies the usual stereotypes of Asian Americans as the only "model minority." Yet the traditional American narrative has rendered the high academic achievements of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean invisible, as if it were a taboo topic.
Instead, we should take a closer look. That was my reaction in 2004 after black Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard's African-American studies department, stirred a black Harvard alumni reunion with questions about precisely where the university's new black students were coming from.
About 8 percent, or 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, they said, but somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of black undergraduates were "West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples."
If we take a closer look, I said at the time, I bet we'll find that Harvard's not alone. With all of the ink and airwaves that have been devoted to immigration these days, black immigrants remain remarkably invisible. Yet their success has long followed the patterns of other high-achieving immigrants.
As one immigrant Jamaican friend once told me, "I'm too busy working two jobs to worry about the white man's racism."

Being the child of Jamaican immigrants stories like these tend to resonate with me.

Do movie critics give Black Hollywood movies fair treatment if they don't deal with "victims of racism, gansters, or dealing with Black peoples various relationship with White people?" Hollywood Reclaimed

That's the history Bryan Barber's extraordinary musical, Idlewild, sets out to rewrite. Starring André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton (who make up the hip-hop duo OutKast), the picture, set in Depression-era Georgia, pulls as much classic American movie iconography as it can manage into its generous, loving grasp and sends it back to us with a black face. In its messy, eager fashion, Idlewild wants to create the black Hollywood glamour that never was, the first-class black musicals and gangster films and love stories no one ever made -- all in one picture. No American movie last year conveyed more joy, more life, more affection for its characters.
It's a terrible irony that a movie standing in delirious opposition to a history of ill-use should suffer the same fate. Kept on the shelf for two years by Universal, which had no idea how to sell it -- a real failure of imagination, since OutKast was becoming ever-more popular in that time -- Idlewild was finally tossed into theaters during the dead days of late August 2006, traditionally a dumping ground for the films that fall between the summer blockbusters and the autumn prestige releases. It played for a few weeks (it's now available on DVD) and garnered some of the most clueless reviews in recent memory, the worst example of the obtuseness with which American film critics have greeted the African American movies that have emerged in the last few years.

NEWS

Three police officers surrendered Monday to face charges in the shooting that killed a groom, Sean Bell on his wedding day.

The policemen, accused of firing most of the 50 shots at three young men in a car outside a nightclub, were being fingerprinted and processed Monday morning before their arraignment.
Michael Oliver, who fired 31 times, and Gescard Isnora, who fired 11 bullets, face felony manslaughter charges, according to a person close to the investigation, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the results were secret. Marc Cooper, who fired four shots, faces a misdemeanor endangerment charge, the person said.
Grand jurors declined to indict on the more serious counts of second-degree murder, and attempted murder, or the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. Two other officers involved in the shooting were not indicted.
"We are a long way from a conviction," said defense attorney Philip Karasyk, who represents Isnora.
Prosecutors have declined to discuss the grand jury's work until the findings are officially released.
The Nov. 25 shooting killed Sean Bell and severely injured two of his bachelor party guests.
Police have said the officers were involved in an undercover investigation at the nightclub when they overheard a conversation that convinced them the men were going to their car to retrieve a gun. They have said that Bell's car hit the unmarked police vehicle and that the officers believed someone in Bell's car was reaching for a gun when they opened fire. No gun was found.
While relatives of the victims waited for the Queens district attorney to unseal the indictment Monday, some were angry about reports of a lavish weekend party involving one of the indicted men.
Oliver ran up a $4,200 bill at a restaurant with supporters feasting on $180 pasta with truffles and $575 bottles of wine, the Daily News reported Monday.
"I don't really know what he was celebrating," said Denise Ford, whose son Trent Benefield was shot and seriously wounded the night Bell was killed. A third friend, Joseph Guzman, also was wounded in the shooting.

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Police shooting are always some of the most difficult cases to deal with. On one hand we all know how difficult a job cops have, we also know that because of the higher crime rate in most Urban areas Blacks are often the most likely victims of crime. But issues such as racial profiling, and the constant mentality that all young Black Men are armed and dangerous, makes their job much more difficult. It's also good to see that unlike the former Fascist Mayor of NY City, this mayor showed sympathy to the victims family.

.Two Republicans Reject Urban League Invitation

Republican presidential candidates Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney are skipping the National Urban League's annual conference this summer, and league president Marc Morial wants them to know he's not happy about it.
"We're sending notice, not just to the Republicans, but to all the candidates, that you're not going to ignore us," said Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who has led the black civil rights organization since 2003.
Speaking with The Politico to make clear his displeasure, Morial said he found it puzzling that the former New York mayor and former Massachusetts governor would not address his organization in July.
"It's an opportunity for them to speak to a very influential audience before a nonpartisan organization that has a history of being fair and balanced," Morial noted. "It sends an incredible message that you're not even going to go to the Urban League," which will convene in St. Louis.
Considered to be more moderate than its contemporary civil rights group, the NAACP, the Urban League has drawn President Bush to its annual conference three times since he was elected in 2000, including in 2004, when Bush appeared a day after his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry. An Urban League spokesperson pointed out that Bush and former Vice President Al Gore attended the conference in 1999.

Remember after several high profile police shooting and butality cases Giuliani refused to meet with ANY Black elected official from NY. Even MODERATE ones from Queens. Romney will of course have from being a Rockefeller Republican to a Jesse Helm Republican by time South Carolina rolls around....

This story is just sad! In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family’s home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.’

PARIS, Texas — The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.
There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.
Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the “black” side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she’s begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself “the best small town in Texas.”
“Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston,” Cherry said. “They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s.”
There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims’ family.
There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.
And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.
The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor–a 58-year-old teacher’s aide–was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town’s juvenile court, convicted of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.
Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family’s house, to probation.

HISTORY

In two weeks, Manhattan Beach CA, city leaders and residents plan to gather at a small park by the ocean to lift the veil from a commemorative plaque, revealing a piece of little-known local history.

"This two-block neighborhood was home to several minority families and was condemned through eminent domain proceedings commenced in 1924," the plaque reads. "Those tragic circumstances reflected the views of a different time."
After debate last summer, the City Council voted to rename the park Bruce's Beach, acknowledging the African American couple who bought the land overlooking the Pacific in 1912.
There, Charles A. and Willa Bruce created one of the few places in Southern California where black families could swim and relax along its sun-bathed shores. They ran an inn called Bruce's Lodge, a cafe and a dance hall.
By the mid-1920s, city leaders contended that the land occupied by the Bruces' resort would better serve the community as a public park. The city used its powers of condemnation to buy the land from the Bruces and other nearby residents, removing most of Manhattan Beach's African American residents and visitors.
No park was built there for three decades...The city of 30,000 remains predominantly white — 89% in the latest census. Just 0.6% of its residents are black, only a small increase since 1970.
Brigham moved to Manhattan Beach from Los Angeles in 1939 at age 12 with his middle-class parents. He recalled riding through the city by bus and wondering why two blocks of seaside land sat barren, pockmarked with weeds and empty Coca-Cola bottles.
"I said to some of the adults, 'Why is it?' " said Brigham, 79. "They would put me off, saying, 'You don't want to know,' or 'You're too young' or 'I don't know.' "
Years later, as a Cal State Fresno graduate student in history, he set out to write his master's thesis on Bruce's Beach and returned to his hometown to ask old-timers the same question. Why is that land still vacant?
"There's a kind of tension," he said, "between people who are very conscious of the history of Bruce's Beach and those who would rather forget about the whole thing."
Brigham, who taught at Mira Costa High School for 38 years, learned that Willa Bruce bought the land in 1912 and that she opened the resort with her husband. Beachgoers flocked there from fast-growing black communities in Los Angeles. A few other black families built homes nearby.
"You would take the Red Car down to the beach and spend a day on the beautiful beach or rent a room if you desired," Miriam Matthews, Los Angeles' first black librarian, said in an essay prepared for the California African American Museum. The resort hosted Sunday school gatherings and families, and "if one tired of the sand and surf, the parlor was available for listening to music or dancing."
White resentment festered.
Beachgoers would find the air let out of their car tires, Brigham wrote in his 1956 thesis. Local members of the Ku Klux Klan tried to set fire to the resort's main building. Someone burned a cross nearby. White residents roped off the sands to keep blacks away.
Eleven years after the resort opened, city officials started condemnation proceedings, and its buildings were razed in 1927. The Bruces received $14,500.

POLITICS

Rethinking the NAACP

The resignation of Bruce S. Gordon as president and chief executive of the NAACP this month portends an important and long overdue shift in black America's struggle for racial justice.
Gordon resigned after only 19 months because he disagreed with the NAACP's board on the best focus for the historic civil rights group. Gordon wanted to direct more resources toward social service programs such as wealth-building, tutoring and pregnancy counseling. The board wanted to maintain its traditional emphasis on fighting racial discrimination and advocating for social justice.
No matter where one stands in this debate, Gordon's resignation signals a critical impasse. The civil rights old guard, represented by the board, seems stuck in a 1960s mind-set that expects a particular form of response from black America -- pushing for government action to remedy the effects of discrimination. This type of response was popular, successful and necessary during the civil rights movement and, in some cases, remains a powerful form of redress.
The successes and failures of the civil rights movement, however, fundamentally changed the country's racial landscape. Of course racial discrimination remains. But we have entered what has been called a post-civil-rights age that requires an array of strategies to address the complex problems many African Americans face.
Gordon sought to extend the reach of the NAACP to include another form of African American dissent: the politics of self-empowerment. Regrettably, the NAACP was not inclined to alter its long-standing approach. Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP board, rejects even the notion that we are in a post-civil-rights period, which requires imaginative and innovative struggle for social justice. Indeed, many current civil rights leaders fetishize the form of dissent most associated with the civil rights movement. They confuse principle with tactics. They behave as though marching and petitioning the government for redress of grievances is the only principled response to the maldistribution of burdens and benefits in our democracy. And they bristle at other forms of dissent, tactics designed to reach the shared goal of equality under law for all Americans. For many, it is either the old way or no way at all.

HEALTH

Longevity gap lessens for blacks

Whites still live longer than blacks, but the gap is shrinking, mainly because death rates are dropping for causes that have historically hit African-American communities particularly hard, HIV and homicide, researchers announced yesterday.
Average life expectancy among blacks rose from 69.2 in 1993 to 72.7 in 2003, while for whites it rose from 76.3 to 78 years, according to a study of mortality statistics released yesterday by The Journal of the American Medical Association.
That reduced the difference to 5.3 years, a historic low that is almost two years less than the gap recorded 10 years earlier, researchers at McGill University in Montreal determined.
Black life expectancy rose in part because of a reduction in homicides and better therapies for those with HIV, said Sam Harper, a McGill epidemiologist who was the lead author. In addition, heart disease rates for black women dropped, he said.
Nevertheless, Harper said, heart disease appears to be the main reason for the continuing gap between blacks and whites.
Writing in the journal, the authors say that narrowing the gap further will require concerted efforts to address all of the problems with an emphasis on heart disease.
"This suggests the need to place a lot more emphasis on cardiovascular disease as the major determinant in this gap," Harper said in an interview.

Their Water Was Poisoned by Chemicals. Was Their Treatment Poisoned by Racism?

DICKSON COUNTY, Tenn. Sheila Holt-Orsted sits on the edge of a sofa in her mother's living room, digging through the large translucent plastic bins arrayed at her feet. The Holt family's fight is in there -- the contaminated water, the cancers, the allegations of racism, the lawsuit. A family's seeming devastation, documented in those bins.
Papers are everywhere, spilling onto the sofa, the floor. Holt-Orsted, 45, burrows in deep. But the document she's looking for can't be found. "It might be in my bed," she says in a voice always verging toward laughter, and she trots off to check.
...She has had cervical polyps. Another of her daughters, Holt-Orsted's sister, has had colon polyps. Three of Holt-Orsted's cousins have had cancer. Her aunt next door has had cancer. Her aunt across the street has had chemotherapy for a bone disease. Her uncle died of Hodgkin's disease. Her daughter, 12-year-old Jasmine, has a speech defect.
They believe trichloroethylene, or TCE, is to blame for it all. The carcinogen leaked from the county landfill, just 500 feet away, and contaminated the Holts' well water. That fact is undisputed. For years, the family drank that water, bathed in that water, cooked in that water -- and had no clue that it might harm them.
Potted plants from Mr. Holt's wake still fill the Holt living room. A stack of albums and CDs recorded by his gospel group, the Dynamic Dixie Travelers, sits on a bookshelf. "I Feel Like My Time Ain't Long" was his favorite song.

Todays country is Trinidad and Tobago