• DeRay Mckesson

  I love Baltimore. This city has made me the man that I am.

  Like an old friend, I’ve seen it at its best and its most challenged. From Ms. Rainey’s second grade class at Rosemont Elementary School to the mixes of K Swift & Miss Tony on 92Q, to the nights at Afram, Shake N Bake and the Inner Harbor, I was raised in the joy and charm of this city.

  Like many others, I know this city’s pain. As the child of two now-recovered addicts, I have lived through the impact of addiction. I too have received the call letting me know that another life has fallen victim to the violence of our city. Like so many other residents, I have watched our city deal what seems like an endless series of challenges and setbacks.

  Perhaps because I have seen both the impact of addiction and the power of recovery, I hold tight to the notion that our history is not our destiny. That we are, and always will be, more than our pain. What we choose to do today and tomorrow will shape our future and build our reality. It is why I believe so strongly that Baltimore is, and has always been, a city of promise and possibility.

  “I look forward to earning your vote and working with you to change the trajectory of Baltimore.” I have come to realize that the traditional pathway to politics, and the traditional politicians who follow these well-worn paths, will not lead us to the transformational change our city needs. Many have accepted that our current political reality is fixed and irreversible – that we must resign ourselves to accept the way that City Hall functions, or the role of money and connections in dictating who runs and wins elections. They have bought into the notion that there is only one road that leads to serve as an elected leader.

  It is easy to accept this, because those of us from Baltimore live and experience the failures of traditional politics and pathways to leadership. Too often the elected individuals we put our public trust in, disappoint us. We have lived through lofty promises and vague plans. We have come to expect little and accept less. When we rely on this traditional model of politics we are rewarded with consistent, disappointing results.

  In order to achieve the promise of our city and become the Baltimore we know we can become, we must challenge the practices that have not and will not lead to transformation. We must demand more from our leaders and local government.

  At its core, being the Mayor is about having a vision for the city that is both aspirational and grounded in reality. It is about demonstrating the ability to turn intentions into reality and maintaining the fortitude to see our ambitions met with strong implementation.

  I am running to be the 50th Mayor of Baltimore in order to usher our city into an era where the government is accountable to its people and is aggressively innovative in how it identifies and solves its problems. We can build a Baltimore where more and more people want to live and work, and where everyone can thrive.

  It is true that I am a non-traditional candidate – I am not a former Mayor, City Councilman, state legislator, philanthropist or the son of a well-connected family. I am an activist, organizer, former teacher, and district administrator that intimately understands how interwoven our challenges and our solutions are.

  I am a son of Baltimore.

  I understand that issues of safety are more expansive than policing, and that to make the city as safe as we want it to be, we will have to address issues related to job development, job access, grade-level reading, transportation, and college readiness, amongst others.

  I also understand that transparency is a core pillar of government integrity. We deserve to know where our city services – from housing and sanitation, to schools and police – are doing well and falling short. To this end, we must invest in a broad range of systems and structures of accountability and transparency, including the release of the internal audits of the Baltimore City Public School System along with annual and timely audits of all city agencies.

  I am not the silver bullet for the challenges of our city – no one individual is. But together, with the right ideas, the right passion, the right people, we can take this city in a new direction.

  In the weeks ahead, I will release a policy platform and a plan for Baltimore that is rooted in these beliefs.

  I look forward to earning your vote and working with you to change the trajectory of Baltimore.

  If you’d like to volunteer, click here. To learn more about how you can support this campaign, click here.

  Together, we will win.

  This post was originally published on Medium.com

  Follow DeRay Mckesson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/deray

• 
  Luvvie Ajayi
  Award-winning writer and digital strategist who thrives at the intersection of comedy, technology and activism.

  I didn’t growing up knowing I was Black or having to deal with the idea of Blackness because I was born and raised in Nigeria. In a country where “Black” is the default, it doesn’t need to be defined or spoken about or made a topic of discussion. I knew I was Yoruba and Nigerian for the first 9 years of my life. I did not become conscious of my color and all that came with it until I moved to the United States with my family.

  It was my first time feeling that being born Black could be a liability. It was my awakening to doubt. It was my introduction to race as an influence. Through my school years, I learned more about slavery, anti-Black racism and oppression in the US, and my Blackness could no longer be an afterthought. I started wearing it proudly and as my consciousness deepened, so did my love for Black folks.

  Through the struggles, I see so much beauty, and the grace of melanin cannot be overstated. Plus, the work it does to keep us from cracking deserves all the praise. We stay looking 25 at 50 years old, thanks to the gods of moisturizer, shea butter and noir blessings! But most importantly, I am heartened by the connection of Black people everywhere.

  Being a global citizen and lover of travel has recently taken me to over 20 countries so far, and one thing that always moves me is how I see home all around me.

  You can go to Brazil and find natives speaking a language close to Yoruba. You can be in Ghana and see someone who looks like someone you know in Chicago. My Trinidadian friends can suck their teeth in a way that makes me think of my Mom doing the same. Some of my Black American friends look like my cousins, betrayed by those high cheekbones that won’t quit. I can go to a club in Nigeria and listen to Hip Hop and R&B. The way we move, the foods we eat, and our power connects us, and I carry that with me and it finds me wherever I go.

  Similarly, our struggles are also parallel across the Black diaspora. As we hail #BlackLivesMatter in the United States, our skinfolks elsewhere are having to do the same, in different fights.

  I was in South Africa in September 2014 and I had to visit Nelson Mandela’s house in Soweto. The system of apartheid there has countless parallels to Jim Crow in the United States, so that was an important site to learn and take it all in. However, my most notable moment happened when I went a few blocks down to visit the Hector Pieterson Museum.

  In 1976, South African students were protesting the new mandate that Afrikaans (a Dutch-based language) would be what they used to teach in school. Police came and shot in the crowd, killing 200 students and 13-year old Hector was one of the first people killed. He became the symbol for the injustice that happened there. In that museum, I was stunned when I stood in front of a picture where protesters held up signs that said “Don’t Shoot.”

  40 years ago, on the other side of the world, Black people used the same phrase we used in Ferguson, after Michael Brown was killed. I was stunned. Across the globe, we have to fight to have our full dignity recognized and our humanity acknowledged. In that moment, I felt more connected to Blackness as a whole. Our struggles are interchangeable no matter what languages we speak or where we call home. #BlackLivesMatter here, and in Haiti, and in Sudan, and in Cuba, and everywhere.

  And we fight until we turn our trials into advancement. Why? Because Diasporan dopeness won’t let us quit. We are manifested from ancestral excellence and we cannot be outdone. Being conscious of Global Blackness is knowing that we are not an island of our struggle, but a nation of our triumphs. That’s Blackness to me.

  Illustration by Alixa Garcia

  This post is part of the “Black Future Month” series produced by The Huffington Post and Black Lives Matter Network for Black History Month. Each day in February, this series will look at one of 29 different cultural and political issues affecting Black lives, from education to criminal-justice reform. To follow the conversation on Twitter, view #BlackFutureMonth.

  Follow Luvvie Ajayi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/iLuvvit

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, sits up in his hotel room bed in Philadelphia, Feb. 10, 1968 while being examined by Dr. Walter Lomax, a Philadelphia physician. (AP Photo)

Last year we lost one of Philadelphia’s truly great men. He would have been 82 this week.

BY MICHAEL COARD  |  JULY 30, 2014 AT 10:48 AM

A version of this story ran last October.

On October 10, 2013, at 8:30 a.m., 81-year-old Dr. Walter P. Lomax Jr. passed away. “So what?” you ask. “What’s the big deal? Don’t old men die every day?”

The big deal, I answer, is that he wasn’t just an old man. The big deal is that he was and is a great man.

Dr. Lomax was a prominent physician, prosperous entrepreneur, and selfless philanthropist. The youngest of four children and a graduate of La Salle University and Hahnemann University Hospital, he opened his first medical office in a row house near his South Philly family home in 1958.

That small-scale clinic expanded over the years to six top-notch medical centers with 22 physicians who provided quality care regardless of income.

 A year after establishing Lomax Health Systems (LHS) in 1982, he continued to display his concern for the health of the less fortunate by establishing Correctional Healthcare Solutions, which ultimately treated inmates in 70 jails in 10 states. He proceeded on his quest to help those in need when, in 1989, LHS partnered with an out-of-state company to create Healthcare Management Alternatives, Inc. (HMA), which dispensed health care to inner city Medicaid recipients in South and West Philly.

He served on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Universal Companies, and Powernomic Enterprise Corp., which is an aquaculture entity that propagates, cultivates and markets fish, seafood and plants, and is an IPO listed on NASDAQ.

He also was the chairman of the Lomax Companies, which is the corporate umbrella for four companies including real estate investment firm Lomax Real Estate Partners, technology businesses Prime Image and MyArtistDNA, and media enterprise 900AM-WURD. It was in 2003 that he and his wife purchased WURD, which is the only black-owned and -operated radio station in Pennsylvania. They did this, in their own words, “to ensure that Philadelphia would remain a powerful voice in the living history of conscious black radio.”

During that same year, he and she formed The Lomax Family Foundation to make funds available to non-profit organizations engaged in health, educational, artistic, and cultural programs for the African-American community.

But more than any of that impressive business success and community service, he was —first and foremost —a loving family man, the affectionate husband of Beverly for more than 50 years, the devoted father of six, namely Bennett, Charles, Claire, Laura, Sara, and W. Thomas, and the doting grandfather and great-grandfather of 15.

A lot of his greatness chronicled above is publicly known. But here are 10 things you might not have known about this great man:

1. When he opened his South Philly clinic in 1958, one of his first calls was from a friend whose neighbor was ill. After rushing to make the “house call” (yes – many doctors did that then), the sickly white woman who opened the door took one look at him, realized he was a black physician, then rudely smirked, derisively chuckled, and abruptly slammed the door in his face. Although he was humiliated and angry, he realized that getting even was the only solution. Hundreds of awards, thousands of patients and millions of dollars later, I wonder who got the last laugh.

2. He traveled to Africa several times to raise his consciousness and to promote black self-help business opportunities.

3. In a 1994 expression of real black power, he bought the plantation in King William County, Virginia, where his great-grandmother had been enslaved and where hundreds of other black women, men and children had been held in brutal bondage since 1732.

4. One of his patients in 1968 was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who, while traveling through town, contracted an upper respiratory infection. Although he was cured at the helpful hands of Dr. Lomax in South Philly, King died just two months later at the hurtful hands of an assassin in the South.

5. He was formally and officially honored in 1998 by the Georgia House of Representatives in SR 764.

6. A local community activist and her family were about to become homeless following a pending eviction. With no assistance available from any public or private source, she called Dr. Lomax – a man  she did not know personally. She contacted him only because she had heard that he was a rich black man with a heart. After getting through his secretaries, she reached him. Before she could finish her tale of woe, he told her to come and pick up the check. He saved the lives of that woman and her children on that day. And the only thing he demanded in return was her silence. His humility is legendary.

7.  With his donation of nearly $20,000 in the 2008 election cycle, he became one of the early financial contributors to the presidential candidacy of (then pro-black, then pro-poor people, then pro-peace and then pro-civil liberties) Senator Barack Obama.

8. In 1994, he wrote a scholarly and groundbreaking medical article in The Journal of The National Medical Association (NMA) entitled “Medicaid Managed Care in Pennsylvania.” The NMA is an organization founded in 1895 “to advance the art and science of medicine for people of African descent …”

9. Lincoln University in Pennsylvania honored him in 2004 with a Ph.D. in science.

10. At a private meeting in his Chalfont office in 2011, he told “The Angriest Black Man In America” (aka Michael Coard) to continue voicing constructive rage on WURD’s Radio Courtroom program because our people need to know and to fight until the victory is won. “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!” is exactly what he and Frederick Douglass said.

You can keep the legacy of the great Dr. Lomax alive by finishing what he started. You can do this by becoming a member of WURD’s “900 In 90 Club.” Simply log on to www.900amwurd.com or call 215-425-7875. And keep “Dr. Greatest Personified” in your memory on July 31st by whispering to yourself “Happy Birthday, sir.”

Michael Coard’s radio show, “The Radio Courtroom,” airs at noon on Sundays and Wednesdays. It can be heard locally on WURD 900 AM and on the Internet at900amwurd.com.