FERGUSON DECISION REACHED; PRAY FOR PEACE (LET GOD AVENGE NOT MAN)

FERGUSON DECISION REACHED:

A decision/ verdict has been reached by a FERGUSON Grand Jury.

To be announced later Monday afternoon.

PLEASE PRAY FOR PEACE IN THAT REGION.

LET GOD AVENGE NOT MAN.

#JusticeForMikeBrown


Article Sources: CNN; NY Daily News; Washington Post; Youtube

ARTICLE: "Grand Jury Reaches Decision In Case Of Ferguson Officer"

A grand jury has reached a decision on whether to indict Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson, Mo. police officer whose fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager sparked days of turbulent protests, sources close to the process said.

News conferences are being prepared by the county prosecutors’ office and the Missouri governor, sources said. Those news conferences will likely come later today.

The sources gave no indication of whether Wilson, 28, will face state charges in the August shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, which triggered a frank conversation about race and police interaction with African-Americans.

The grand jury’s decision is the latest turn in a case marked in the national consciousness by the stunning images of protesters looting stores and police wearing riot gear and deploying tear gas in the days after Brown’s death.

Details of the grand jury’s deliberations have leaked out in recent weeks, angering the Brown family and protesters who saw it as a signal there would be no charges filed.

Althought a parallel federal civil rights investigation of the shooting is continuing, federal investigators have all but concluded they don’t have a case against Wilson, law enforcement officials have said. Federal investigators are also conducting a broader probe of the Ferguson Police Department.

If Wilson is not charged, government officials are bracing for protests in the St. Louis area and nationwide. They have discussed emergency plans in the event of a violent reaction, while protest and community leaders have mapped out their response in the hopes of avoiding the unrest that exploded after Brown was killed.

Black Communities Fight To Be Debt-Free & Find Jobs

What The Great Recession Stole From Black America


The economic boom of the 1990s led to an historic expansion on Main Street, especially for African Americans. But in the decade that followed, a major unraveling began that pushed many blacks back onto the side streets of America.

From March 1991 to March 2001, more than 22 million jobs were added to the economy. The overall unemployment rate fell from 7.4 to 3.9 percent and stayed low for more than two years. African-American families in particular enjoyed huge income increases and a significant drop in poverty.

While the 1990s boom didn't come close to ending persistent racial inequality, it made some pretty significant dents.

But the 2001 recession, the weak expansion that followed and the Great Recession that still hangs over the economy today have erased many of those gains.

The boom years: During the 1990s economic expansion, African-American family income increased by 29 percent, poverty among African-American families fell by 10.4 percentage points and the share of African Americans in the workforce increased dramatically.

The population of men in the workforce increased 2.2 points, with the largest gains among 20 to 34 year olds. And the improvement was largest among young men with no more than a high school degree.

Where they lived was a factor, too. African-American men with the least skills and education benefited the most if they lived in cities with low overall unemployment, such as Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis and Raleigh, North Carolina.

The bust years: When the economy stalled in 2001, African American communities were hit hard, and never fully recovered during the rebound in the middle of the decade. Then came the Great Recession, which wiped out many of the gains made in employment and income, particularly among black men.

Employment among African-American males has eroded beyond the starting point during the 1990s boom. From 2001 to 2007, the share of African American men that had a job dropped by 1.4 percentage points.

The erosion was greatest among those aged 20 to 34 -- only 60.1 percent of black men in that age group were employed in 2009, compared to 71.6 percent in 2001.

And those who were employed were making less money. Roughly one-quarter of the income gains that the median African American family made have eroded. While the erosion is smaller than that of white, Asian and Latino families, African American income overall is still only half that of white and Asian families.

Even in the more "recession-proof" cities that suffered few job losses during the downturns, African American employment gains were almost entirely wiped out, because modest drops in the unemployment rate disproportionately affected black workers.

In the 39 areas where the overall unemployment rate remained below 5 percent throughout the decade, unemployment among adult African American males fell from 10.8 percent to 4.6 percent during the 1990s boom, but rose to 5.8 percent during the 2001 to 2007 recovery, and then jumped to 15 percent during the recession.

Prospects for the future: At this stage of the recovery, the concern is that that the weak jobs recovery and continued fiscal and political constraints will unleash a new surge in income inequality.

Tepid economic growth is too small for robust job creation, and state and local governments and nonprofits are belt-tightening -- factors that tend to disproportionately affect minorities.

Systemic risk will continue to adversely impact low- and moderate- income families for a number of reasons. Safety nets are not as strong as they were several decades ago, efforts to provide consumer information and worker protections are being met with hostility, and people and communities are more interconnected, so smaller, regional economic shocks have stronger ripple effects.

Just as African Americans bore the brunt of the recession, they will bear the brunt of a slow economic recovery.

Reducing the barriers that African Americans face will require the Obama Administration's general policy responses, plus some targeted responses. Otherwise, many African Americans now living on America's side streets will face major challenges finding their way back onto Main Street.


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Sources: CNN, Google Maps

Black Churches Remain Community Solution Centers: Black In America

Past Inspires Modern Solutions For Historic Black Churches

This old Southern city is still waking up when the first members drift into the church basement. They turn on the lights, pull metal chairs across the wooden floor and settle in with paper cups of coffee and the weight of the week.

There's work or not enough work. Diabetes. Tonight's dinner and tomorrow's, too. Parents in prison, neighbors just getting out. Kids who want some faraway, high-cost college and kids who don't want to get out of bed on Sundays. Then there's money -- always, forever money -- to think about. They've heard weekly sermons about how to plan, overcome and grow, but the lessons really start to apply in Bible study, like today, when they'll pore over a line and relate it back to the messy, wonderful business of living.

Worry is nothing new for the congregation at First African Baptist Church, which is well into its third century and one of the oldest black congregations in the United States. But this is a loving congregation, they say, and always the type to take action when times are hard. Of course they will feed the hungry, clothe the naked and teach the young, but they also want to preserve their space. Members say it was the first brick structure in Georgia that was built, used and owned by black people, that it's their own living history of slavery, civil rights and freedom.

It's just so much.

"This is not new for us," says Gladys Cohen, a lifetime member and 7 a.m. Bible study regular. "There's just more needs."

So, with darkness pouring in the windows and a long day still ahead, the Rev. Thurmond N. Tillman sits in his folding chair and reminds his followers of the Bible passage he repeats most, from the book of Matthew: "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you."

As they all know, it has worked for this congregation before.


Faith First, Then Freedom

More than 150 years ago, slaves built this church by fire and moonlight. They raised the walls with clay and sand blocks known as Savannah Gray Brick, and a white ceiling patterned after a nine-patch quilt, a symbol of safety from slavery.

After the first Bible study of the day, Johnny McDonald explains this to a small tour group seated in the church's curved oak pews. He was baptized in First African's chilly pool at age 7 and began giving tours as a teen. He's 22 now, one semester shy of graduation from Savannah State University. He learned the church's history through a thousand sermons and older members' memories. Several times a week, he leads tours of each level, and shares everything he knows.

He talks about the earliest church leaders, who were whipped and harassed by white residents who balked at the idea of a black preacher. He tells of schisms that divided the flourishing black congregation.

He explains that in the 1830s, a white congregation planned to move to a new location, and offered its land and an aging wooden building to First African Baptist Church. The price was $1,500.

Most of the church members were slaves, whose labor fueled Savannah's agriculture and shipping economy. But many could earn money of their own by working after-hours or taking odd jobs. Some could save enough to buy freedom for themselves and their families.

So, they faced a choice, McDonald says: Use money saved to free themselves, or pool their funds to purchase a church for all.

He imagines that they read the line from Matthew, about seeking God's kingdom first; he knows that within a few months, they came up with the money, and the church was theirs.

But the building was already deteriorating when First African moved in. By the 1850s, Savannah was a growing city of 14,000 free residents and 7,000 slaves. The pastor championed a new structure, one made of brick, one made to last.

This very building, McDonald says.

He points out the handiwork of members who toiled through the night from 1855 to 1859. They designed a tall sanctuary, balcony seating and pews with ancient African languages carved into the sides.

Perhaps their best plan was mostly out of view, McDonald explains as he leads visitors down stairs and into the basement. Beneath the wooden floor, builders left a space four feet tall, large enough to hide hundreds of slaves following the Savannah River to freedom. They punctured holes in the floor in the cross-and-diamond shape of an African prayer symbol, the Kongo Cosmogram, and publicly worshipped its ancient meaning. Quietly, underneath, runaways worshipped the light and air the symbols allowed.

"You're talking about working 12 to 16 hours, then turning around to come build a church at nighttime and going back to work on fields after that," he tells the tour group. "If I can say so, that's a lot of hard work, and a lot of dedication to the task at hand."

Most of the builders were still enslaved after the church doors opened, but freedom came to them a few years later, anyway, through the Emancipation Proclamation.

McDonald repeats the passage from Matthew again, "All things shall be added."

"That was no coincidence," he tells the crowd.

The pastor interrupts the tour to invite the guests to stay. There's another Bible study at noon, and everyone is welcome here.


Rebuilding The Church

"Do we see ourselves as programmers, or do we see ourselves as builders?" the pastor asks.

It's time for the evening Bible study, and the crowd has outgrown the basement. They're sitting in pews in business suits and blue jeans; Tillman is in the same suit he started the day in 12 hours before. They murmur the question, wondering what trick he has thrown at them. He asks again: Programmers, doing service as a thoughtless habit? Or builders, serving to edify their church and its mission in the community?

Since Tillman took over in 1982, he has simplified how people worship. He encouraged members to decentralize ministries and take the lessons from church into their everyday lives. He wants them to consider the community's needs and use their talents to serve the church, whether they're passing out water at football games, teaching a seminar about financial planning or leading a church tour. This will never be a church that has to look far for service projects, Tillman says.

He needs only look at their building. It needs a kitchen; the old one was removed to make wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. They want to replace the steeple with a 100-foot replica of the original, which was knocked down by a hurricane about a century ago. They want to rip the stucco off the exterior and preserve those old gray bricks, then build a museum out back to teach thousands of visitors who take their tour every year. It will cost millions, and nobody wants to spend a dime till they can do it without debt.

In Savannah, a city where history now drives much of the economy, they're likely to get community support. Still, African-American spaces have long fallen behind others. Where there are well-preserved plantation mansions, slave quarters are often long gone. Aging churches all over the country are at risk, too -- there will always be other worries and other causes that need to be funded first.

But there's no ignoring history, and especially faith, the pastor believes.

"Just the fact that we're in this building is a constant reminder of where God has blessed us," Tillman says. "Those who were enslaved were able to build a sanctuary, an edifice like this, that's built four-brick deep, that's meant to stand for the ages -- surely we can keep it up. Surely, we can do other great and wonderful things in this day and time, regardless of how the economic times are."

We are builders, he tells the congregation, and builders must have plans.


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Sources: CNN

Black Homeowners Hit Hardest By Foreclosure Crisis: Black In America

Housing Crisis Hits Blacks Hardest

The Foreclosure crisis has hit Blacks harder than any other group in America and it will be tough for them to regain their footing in the housing market.

Blacks' homeownership rate has plummeted nearly 6 percent to 46.2 percent since its peak in 2004. That's more than twice that of any other racial or ethnic group, as well as the nation's rate as a whole, which fell only 2.3 percent, according to U.S. Census data.

Also, among recent borrowers, nearly 8 percent of blacks have lost their homes to foreclosure, compared to 4.5 percent of whites, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. Latinos, who have also been pummeled by the mortgage meltdown, came in a close second behind blacks in foreclosure losses.

The consequences are devastating. Fewer blacks own their home now than any other racial or ethnic group and that makes it even more difficult for them to achieve financial security and attain wealth.

"We built the middle class on homeownership," said Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League, which works to empower the black community. "How many people have built their business with the equity in their home? How many people have sent their kids to college with the equity in their home?"

The loss of homeownership is more than the difference between a mortgage payment and a rent check, experts say. Purchasing property is the key to building wealth, which not only allows people to improve their quality of life and provide more for their children, but also gives them a cushion during tough economic times.

Billions and billions of dollars were stripped away from a community that already had lower levels of wealth than white communities," said Debbie Bocian, senior researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending, which estimates blacks will lose $194 billion in wealth through 2012 due to the mortgage meltdown. "It exacerbates all the socio-economic divides. The consequences are intergenerational."

Subprime lending and unemployment

During the housing boom, nearly seven in 10 Americans owned their home, a gain of 7.8 percent from a decade earlier. Black Americans saw their home ownership rates rise twice as fast to 49.1 percent, thanks in large part to easy credit.

But many of those new mortgages -- which often came with low teaser rates that would adjust upward after two or three years -- would prove unaffordable.

Overall, blacks were 150 percent more likely to get high-cost loans, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. Even when they had similar income and credit scores as white borrowers, blacks were about 30 percent more likely to be steered to expensive mortgages.

When home prices started to fall, borrowers found themselves trapped in subprime loans. And since so many people in the black community had these mortgages, they suffered disproportionately in the early stages of the mortgage meltdown.

Now, the foreclosure crisis has now expanded beyond the subprime market. More and more people with stronger credit backgrounds and more stable mortgages are defaulting on their loans because they've lost their jobs.

But here too, blacks are at a disadvantage. Black unemployment stood at 16.1 percent in September, the highest of any group and 6.5 percentage points above the national average.

"The unemployment rate in the African-American community is sky high," said Chris Herbert, research director at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. "That's certainly behind their high foreclosure rate."

Tight credit going forward

It's tough for anyone to get a mortgage these days. But it's even more difficult if you are black.

Nearly one-third of blacks were denied loans in 2009, compared to 13.1 percent of whites and 25.6 percent of Latinos, according to federal data released last month. The disparity can't be explained solely by differences in applicants' incomes and loan amount requested. Even when these factors are the same, blacks are still twice as likely to be turned down, a Home Mortgage Disclosure Act report found.

Nearly 49.8 percent of blacks had their refinance applications rejected, compared to 21 percent of whites and 41 percent of Latinos.

These stats mean that many blacks can't shift into lower-cost mortgages in order to save their homes, nor can they purchase their first property and boost homeownership rates.

"Credit constraints are a real concern," Herbert said. "While there is a need for tighter underwriting standards, we have to be careful not to go too far and unnecessarily limit access to credit that helps families manage their finances and build wealth."

One solution that the National Urban League is pushing is more homebuyer education programs. First-time purchasers who go through a course that teaches them about budgets, debt, home maintenance costs and risky, expensive loans are less likely to default, experts say.

"We need a fundamental commitment to housing counseling to prepare people to become homeowners," Morial said.


Sources: CNN