Like many sets of twins, Celine Gunderman and Whitney Gunderman are just inseparable. Like many sets of twins, the Gundermans are choosing to attend the same college. Maybe more accurately in the case of these Cypress Bay High School seniors, one of the nation's most selective institutions, West Point, chose both of them.
[ SOURCE] More African-Americans diagnosed with HIV are living.
A report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found an 18% drop in the number of deaths among African-Americans infected with HIV from 2008 to 2012.
That is a consistent and promising decline, and yet it still means 8,165 African-American HIV patients lost their lives in 2012, a marked disparity that accounts for nearly half of the 17,166 teens and adults with HIV who died in total that year.
Most black HIV patients who died were men who contracted the virus through sexual contact with other men.
"We cannot drop our guard," Dr. Eugene McCray, director of the CDC's division of HIV/AIDS prevention, said in a statement. "HIV is still a serious crisis in our communities. Even though we represent only 12% of the population, more than a third of people living with HIV in the United States are black. And new infections among young, gay black men are increasing at an alarming rate."
While HIV testing is increasing among African-Americans, new infections are still diagnosed less frequently in blacks compared with whites, the CDC said.
The agency also said black HIV patients are less likely to be linked to medical care than any other race. McCray said providing that care and treatment could do more than anything else to keep HIV patients alive and prevent new infections.
The report comes just two days before National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, on February 7, which aims to reduce new infections by encouraging HIV testing.
[SOURCE] Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, reflected later on how it felt to be treated less than equal and once feistily wrote of how tired she was of being "pushed around" — parts of her history long hidden away.
Beginning Wednesday at the Library of Congress, researchers and the public will have full access to Parks' archive of letters, writings, personal notes and photographs for the first time. The collection will provide what experts call a more complex view of a woman long recalled in history for one iconic image — that of a nonviolent seamstress who inspired others to act at the dawning of the civil rights era.
A protracted legal battle between her heirs and friends had kept the collection from public view for years. But in 2014, philanthropist Howard Buffett bought the collection and placed it on long-term loan at the national library.
"I think it's one of the first times we're actually able to read her voice, and it just totally goes against this image of the quiet seamstress," said Margaret McAleer, an archivist at the library. "Her writings are phenomenally powerful."
"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn't take it anymore," she wrote. "When I asked the policeman why we had to be pushed around, he said he didn't know. 'The law is the law. You are under arrest.' I didn't resist."
Parks' archive provides scholars and the public with a fuller sense of her life and faith, her personality and her pain, said library historian Adrienne Cannon.
"It's important because we see Rosa Parks in a kind of almost frozen, iconic image — a hero that is not really real flesh and blood," Cannon said. "Here we get a sense of a woman that is really full flesh and blood."
The collection may surprise people by revealing Parks had an aggressive edge and supported more radical actions seeking equality over the years, archivists said. She used her symbolic status to support Malcolm X, Black Panther gatherings and the Wilmington 10 in North Carolina.
The library now holds about 7,500 manuscript items and 2,500 photographs from Parks, including the Bible she kept in her pocket, letters from admirers and her Presidential Medal of Freedom. A small exhibit is planned for March. All the items will be digitized and posted online.
Artifacts such as Parks' clothing, furniture and a pillbox hat she may have worn on the Montgomery bus, will find homes elsewhere. The library plans to place them with other museums or institutions that can conserve and display Parks' belongings. The library already is in talks with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture, now under construction on the National Mall, to possibly house some items.
Rutgers Today talked to Khadijah White about why Black History Month is important as the university plans a series of events in observance. White, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies in the School of Communication and Information, researches race, gender and politics in media. She has written about race, social movements, media, and politics for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Root, Huffington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Los Angeles Times, Quartz and other publications. White is also a regular contributor to the online magazine, Role/Reboot.
Why is Black History Month relevant?
There has long been a contention among student and teacher activists that educators in this country, who are predominantly white, would not teach about black history at all if it weren’t for people explicitly setting aside space and time for it. Now, at least for this month, students can learn about how African Americans quite literally built this society and provided its foundation in so many ways. American history has been shaped around the marginalization and exclusion of African Americans in many arenas. As a result, there are lots of obstacles that have kept African Americans from being fully integrated or recognized in American history. Their accomplishments have often been occluded. Take technological invention, for instance. Black inventors often didn’t get credit for their inventions, and when they did manage to get patents, white inventors often tried to steal them. Granville Woods, for instance, an engineer and inventor with more than 50 patents to his name, often had to fight off attempts by white inventors to steal his patents. Woods is often called “the black Edison,” which I think is really a shame.
What are the most important issues Americans should be discussing during Black History Month?We should reflect on how far we’ve come – and we’re really good at that – but also on how short we’ve fallen. One of the reasons for the recent popularity of the movie Selma, one of the reasons it strikes a chord with so many Americans, is that it reminds us that the issues that people were fighting for back in 1965 are still relevant now – voting rights, in particular. Some parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been cut back, and the “voter ID” laws being proposed and passed in many states are a new way to make it more difficult for people to vote. Incarceration is another – there are now more black men in prison today than were enslaved in 1850. And the decline of public education, another major issue during the civil rights movement, has turned these sacred institutions into school-to-prison pipelines.
What’s the most important thing African Americans are saying that the rest of America should hear?I think lots of African Americans are saying, look, it’s good that we have a black president, and, yes, we have come a long way. But African Americans are falling behind and discriminated against in all kinds of measures – housing, employment, health care, the justice system, education, police killings of black citizens. The decline of public education in this country disproportionately affects African Americans and people are fighting for access to water in Detroit. People should really check out what’s happening with #BlackLivesMatter, which has been trending on social media in recent months. People born after the sixties so often say they wish they were born at a time when a movement was rising up, and here’s a movement that’s happening right now.
