African Americans

You are very, very sleepy

Community blasts council’s actions

Here’s a look at African American issues and people making headlines through-out the country. Alabama Birmingham Health Care and Dr. Edwin Moyo recently announced the opening of Moyo Ensley Health Center. Birmingham Health Care has served Jefferson County and Birmingham, Alabama for more than 25 years in health care. The center held an celebratory opening for the residents in the community, complete with free dental screenings, diabetes testing, and blood pressure checks. California Stray bullets hit a gas meter and the inside of an occupied apartment in south Sacramento County recently, said a spokesman for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department. Nobody was hurt, but three children, and an adult were asleep in the apartment when the shooting occurred. The shooting occurred at an apartment complex in the 7400 block of Power Inn Road about 4 a.m. A resident of the apartment said she heard three shots from outside her apartment. One bullet went through her bathroom and bedroom doors. Another round hit a gas meter, causing a small leak that has been fixed. District of Columbia Alleging that Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration wanted a “different kind of workforce” in place at the Child and Family Services Agency, nine of its former workers recently filed a class action lawsuit charging that their terminations were laced with race and age discrimination. There was a pattern of dismissing primarily Black employees, all over age 40. Prospects in line for the new, mostly paraprofessional, jobs now also had to have a bachelor’s degree, which he said discounted the experience of people who had already been doing the work. However, George Johnson, executive director of the AFSCME District 20 Council, described the reduction in force (RIF) as a hoax to disguise the CFSA and Fenty’s administration’s obsession with shifting the city workforce in a direction that increasingly marginalizes African-American workers. The lawsuit, filed on Sept. 13 in U. S. District Court, charges that when CFSA sent out 91 RIF letters dated May 6, all but two were addressed to African Americans, although they had performed their duties satisfactorily. It further states CFSA misread federal guidelines regarding the requirement of college degrees for certain jobs – and that paraprofessionals, in this instance, are not held to such restrictions.