Atlanta signs 50-year deal with
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Lakewood Fairgrounds in southeast Atlanta will be the site of a studio campus for television, commercial, digital and film production. EUE/Screen Gems, one of the nation's leading studios in film and television production, is leasing 30 acres from the Lakewood property, city officials announced last week. |
ATLANTA – The city took a major step towards becoming the true "Hollywood of the South" recently when EUE/Screen Gems Studios signed a 50-year lease to move into the little-used Lakewood Fairgrounds in southeast Atlanta.
Political and business leaders last week celebrated a new partnership with EUE/Screen Gems, among the nation's leading studios in film and television production. The company is leasing 30 acres from the Lakewood property, officials said, and have opened a studio campus there for television, commercial, digital and film production.
Mayor Kasim Reed called the film and television partnership "truly monumental."
"This lease agreement will have an immense economic and cultural impact on the entire City of Atlanta," Reed said. "Not only will it provide industry-related job opportunities to our residents, but it will also have a positive impact on Lakewood's neighboring areas by creating secondary business and job opportunities."
The new partnership also will help Atlanta compete more effectively with other municipalities vying for business in the entertainment industry, Reed said.
"Creating these types of advantageous investments in Atlanta is vital in moving Atlanta forward as the next major mecca of the film and television industry," Reed said.
EUE/Screen Gems President and COO Chris Cooney said the company became interested in the property when industry people kept insisting that officials look at the southeast Atlanta property.
"Producers, directors and studios came to us and asked us to go into Atlanta," Cooney said. "We were humbled by that vote of confidence, and we feel strongly about how this investment further extends our offerings."
Formal talks to lease the 30-acre Lakewood property began in April. A month later, the Atlanta City Council approved a 50-year lease. The lease was signed in July 2010.
EUE/Screen Gems will upgrade four buildings on the property – which will be transformed into four sound stages – and will build a new 36,000 square-foot sound stage that will be ready by March, company officials said.
Once completed, the new complex will offer more than 100,000 square feet of studio space that will be used for television, commercial, digital and film production, officials said.
The new owners say they will not produce any movies or television programs themselves, but will rent the facilities to other movie and TV production companies.
So far in 2010, 12 major films, eight reality TV shows, and three independent films have been slated for production in Atlanta, Reed said. The Atlanta film boom and EUE/Screen Gems were highlighted last weekend in a CNN report, officials said.
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National News Briefs
Man pleads not guilty in post-Katrina shooting
NEW ORLEANS – A white Mississippi man who federal prosecutors say fired a shotgun at three black men in a racially motivated attack following Hurricane Katrina has pleaded not guilty to all five counts he faces.
Roland Bourgeois Jr., a 47-year-old Columbia resident, is accused of opening fire on the men as they tried to leave New Orleans after the 2005 storm.
He was arraigned on a five-count indictment that claims after the hurricane Bourgeois and others discussed shooting black people and defending the New Orleans
Slain man's family to get $125,000
HOMER, La. – A $125,000 settlement has been approved for the family of a 73-year-old black man shot and killed by a white policeman in a small Louisiana town.
The vote by the Homer Board of Selectmen ends a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the widow and four children of Bernard Monroe Sr., the Times of Shreveport reports. Monroe was shot and killed by Officer Tim Cox on Feb. 20, 2009, as police chased one of Monroe's sons through his house.
The shooting outraged many in the rural town of 3,800 in northwest Louisiana. Police said Monroe was armed, but witnesses said he just had a water bottle under one arm.
Cox and Officer Joseph Henry resigned about five months later. A grand jury declined in January to indict either officer.
Federal judge ends desegregation case
ORLANDO, Fla. – A federal judge has put to rest the public school desegregation case for the school district in Orlando.
U.S. District Judge Anne Conway issued a ruling ending the court's oversight of desegregation efforts by the Orange County school district.
The judge says in her ruling that the school district has done away with past vestiges of racism to the extent that is practicable.
The school district had been under federal court oversight since 1962. That year,
black families sued the district for running separate schools for black and white children.
Former Obama appointee new CEO of Ebony owner
Former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers, who resigned months after an uninvited couple crashed the Obama administration's state dinner for the Indian prime minister, is the new chief executive officer at Johnson Publishing Company Inc.
The Chicago-based company, which publishes Ebony and Jet magazines, is the nation's largest black-owned and operated publisher.
Rogers, 51, had been consulting for Johnson Publishing for two months and took over daily operations last week, company officials said.
"Desiree has a proven track record of successful business leadership," said Johnson Publishing CEO Linda Johnson Rice, who remained chairman. ``She is a longstanding confidant and a savvy businesswoman."
Rogers, who has an MBA from Harvard University, is a New Orleans native whose experience includes director of the Illinois Lottery, president of the Chicago area Peoples Gas and North Shores Gas and president of social networking at Allstate Financial.
Black filmmaker honored in S.D.
PIERRE, S.D. – A novelist and pioneering black filmmaker who homesteaded in the early part of the 20th Century is being honored by the South Dakota town of Gregory.
The U.S. Postal Service stamp honoring Oscar Micheaux was unveiled in South Dakota this week at the 15th annual Oscar Micheaux Film and Book Festival in Gregory. The four-day festival features
African American films, black history and live music.
Micheaux was a railroad porter before becoming a farmer in South Dakota and later an author and film producer. He wrote, produced, directed and distributed independent black films into the 1940s. He died in 1951.
Court upholds ban on affirmative action
SAN FRANCISCO – California's high court has upheld the state's 14-year-old law barring preferential treatment of women and minorities in public school admissions, government hiring and contracting.
In a 6-1 ruling, the state Supreme Court rejected arguments from the city of San Francisco and Attorney General Jerry Brown that the law, known as Proposition 209, violates federal equality protections.
Opponents of the ban say it creates barriers for minorities and women that don't exist for other groups, such as veterans.
The ruling written by Justice Joyce Kennard came in response to lawsuits filed by white contractors challenging San Francisco's affirmative action program, which was suspended in 2003.
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Death of 13-year-old sparks call for federal help
By Wendell Hutson
Contributing Writer
CHICAGO – The brutal shooting death of a 13-year-old youth – shot 22 times while riding his bike near his South Side home – has black ministers calling for federal intervention to help stop youth violence in America's cities.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and two dozen black ministers gathered near the site where Robert Freeman Jr. was gunned down and called on federal officials to help stop the killings of young people in the U.S.
Jackson said Black-on-Black crime is a longstanding problem in the black community, but reminded those gathered at the site that blacks do not manufacture guns or illegal drugs.
"The black community is a target market for drugs and violence," he added. "As a community, we must love and protect our children to prevent more Robert Freemans from being brutality murdered."
Jackson said youth violence would decline if the federal government helped create more jobs and helped provide better public transportation.
"In this community, the unemployment rate for adults is 30 percent and 50 percent for teenagers," he said. "We need jobs and job training so people can go back to work."
The Rev. Walter Turner, pastor of New Spiritual Light Baptist Church on the South Side, said he agrees that blacks suffer from more than just violence.
"This is more than violence with guns but violence with economics," he said. "We need to find a way to make living in economically depressed areas safer."
Freeman was gunned down near his home in an incident that some believe was a case of mistaken identity. He was the 43rd person to be killed in Chicago in July.
The youngster's slaying and the violent weekend that came in its wake – more than 20 shootings, six of them fatal – also had Mayor Richard Daley speaking out.
Daley announced new initiatives to deal with the violence, which he called "our most immediate and pressing challenge" and he agreed that the solution requires many answers.
"Violence is a complex challenge," Daley said at a news conference. "As reasonable people understand, making Chicago safer doesn't have one answer, it has many. That's why we're working on many fronts and in many ways to make our streets safer."
Daley said the gang bangers and drug dealers who are responsible for much of the city's street violence are a "small but violent part" of Chicago.
"The problem is that they believe they're above the law and they don't care about the consequences of their violence," Daley said. "As a city, we must stand up to them."
Daley said while there were 43 homicides in July, that's down from 57 homicides last July and down from 62 in 2008.
That's little consolation to Robert Freeman Sr., who said the last time he saw his son, the teenager looked happy and full of joy.
"He was a good son and lived life to its fullest. I loved him very much and now he is gone," Freeman said of his oldest son. "Even though I have another son (and a daughter) there is something special about your first born."
"I now know how other parents feel when they have to bury their kids,' he said. "Parents should not outlive their children… But when you live in a violent community, things like this are bound to happen."
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Obama needs envoy on race, some activists say
President 'skittish' and 'timid' on racial matters, some argue
By Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Editor-in-Chief
WASHINGTON – Statements from House Majority Whip James Clyburn that President Barack Obama may need a special envoy to black America is raising eyebrows in some political circles and raising new concerns that Obama is tentative on race matters.
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"The president's getting hurt real bad. He needs some black people around him… I don't think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite." James Clyburn |
Speaking after a black Department of Agriculture employee – Shirley Sherrod – was unfairly forced to resign amid a racially charged incident, Clyburn said Obama's inner circle keeps "screwing up" on race.
"The president's getting hurt real bad," Clyburn told the New York Times. "He needs some black people around him."
"Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race," said Clyburn, former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. "They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us.
"I don't think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite."
The debate was fueled further when D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said Obama needed more black people in his inner circle.
"The president needs some advisers or friends who have a greater sense of the pulse of the African-American community," she said, "or who at least have been around the mulberry bush."
Some say the Sherrod case – coupled with the Arizona racial profiling and immigration protests, the advent of racial elements within the Tea Party and the uprisings following the Oakland, Calif. subway shooting trial of Oscar Grant – are among issues that illustrate a dire need for high-profile White House intervention.
Others even say the president is "skittish" or "timid" on race and has neglected the need for policies and procedures that could help quell controversies or abate them in advance.
"In general, I think that if they had developed in the administration, a better and more comprehensive way of dealing with racial matters, they would have handled this (the Sherrod case) differently," says Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law.
"I think that they're skittish. They continue to be too skittish on issues that directly implicate race relations, racial interactions, racial intolerance, racial conflict," she continued. "They have not figured out how to handle those matters well. That's why they continue to stumble on these matters."
Some analysts, however, disagree that Obama should take a leading role in dealing with America's race issues. Among those is Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.
"I don't think it's as important for the president to lead us in these discussions as it is for us to address some of these issues personally," says Ogletree, who represented black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates last year in his run-in with a white police officer. The public debacle ended with a so-called "beer summit" at the White House.
With African-American representatives from every segment of "an increasingly divisive society," Ogletree says, "at some point we need to realize that this movement starts from the bottom up."
He adds that Blacks who are economically able should personally concentrate on helping others. This must happen outside the White House, he said. "We have to have our own new Black renaissance movement," Ogletree says. "And we have to be much more focused on unity of us all."
But, Dr. Ron Walters, a political analyst and racial politics expert, says because of the gravity of the race issue in America and the fact that the problem is prone to grow, the issue must be dealt with by the White House.
"There needs to be, in the White House structure, someone with credibility to handle outreach to the Black community," Walters says. "The second thing is that his staff needs to respect race as a dynamic issue in American society and culture and politics that will confront them at every step of the way.
"This is not a side issue," he continued. "It is the most dynamic issue in American society and he is Black, which means his approach to it has to have the same respect as other issues" with staffing and experts.
Former Tennessee Circuit Court Judge and civil rights activist D'Army Bailey said the debate over race represents a teachable moment for black America.
"The lesson here is that we have to keep pressures on the White House. We cannot take for granted that just because we have an African-American president that the sensitivity is going to be there," said Bailey, an author and a founder of the National Civil Rights Museum.
"I have no concern about this president's Blackness. But, his timidity when it comes to the tough issues of race, that does concern me," Bailey says.
To his credit, Obama has spoken out strongly on race. Last week during the National Urban League 100th Anniversary Conference, he spoke strongly on the Sherrod case:
"The full story she was trying to tell –- a story about overcoming our own biases and recognizing ourselves in folks who, on the surface, seem different -– is exactly the kind of story we need to hear in America," Obama told delegates.
He has also received rousing standing ovations at the NAACP's centennial conference in New York and at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference last year. At these functions, he speaks almost predominately on issues from a race perspective.
Bailey says there are other steps Obama can take to at least connect more with the Black community.
"He has to work harder to avoid the isolation of the White House and connect with the hard-felt sentiments of the people in the streets," Bailey says.
"Just like he's vacationed in Florida and in the Gulf to show his empathy, he's got to come off the vineyard and get out into the community and feel those people, too."
AP contributed to this report.
