CFABJ members are making themselves known nationally!

Check out CFABJ treasurer Chester Glover with Cornel West at the State of the Black Union event.

Chet attended the conference in New Orleans in February, and sends this report:

 ”I went to New Orleans for the Tavis Smiley Presents The State of The Black Union event. Smiley asked those attending the SOBU to come a day early to volunteer a day of service to the hurricane-torn communities of the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards, Central City and New Orleans East. More than 1,000 volunteers worked Friday to help build homes, paint schools, build playgrounds and beautify state parks.

My volunteer effort was in New Orleans East at the Fannie C. Williams Elementary School, where I was one of 115 volunteers, including a group of students from the University of Central Florida, who painted murals for the inside and outside walls of the nine huge temporary modular units where students attend classes and activities while the fate of the storm-damaged school building is mired in government red tape.

Saturday morning, the two panel discussions of the SOBU featured Dr. Cornel West, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Donna Brazil, Michael Eric Dyson, the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Sr., Dick Gregory and course, Mayor Ray Nagin.

After the discussions, presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) spoke to the estimated 5,000 people attending the ninth annual event.

Next year the event returns to Los Angeles, CA, the site of the inaugural
State of the Black Union.”

You can see more pictures from Chet’s weekend at our CFABJ Flickr account.

 In other chapter news, Anika Myers Palm was one of several journalists chosen to participate in the Kerner Plus 40 project, which ended in February. The project, which marked the 40th anniversary of the report issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders after uprisings in several U.S. cities, was sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Africana Studies and Annenberg School for Communication as well as The Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North Carolina A&T State University. Anika, other journalists and several academics wrote about the report and its aftermath, and were part of a week of roundtable discussions about the project in North Carolina and Philadelphia during the last week of February.