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Robert Jackson The Man With The Power to Save Harlem From Gentrification
By Kwesi McDavid Arno
The one elected official who has the most sway over the planned Columbia expansion into West Harlem is City Councilman Robert Jackson, who represents the district.
In an interview with BlackBallot.com, Robert Jackson was kind enough to explain the governmental process that Columbia must go through in order to obtain approval for its proposed new campus in West Harlem. Please click on the picture to see the interview.
The Uniform Land Use Review Procedure  ULURP is the process established as part of the New York City Charter in order to allow the public, or the government that supposedly represents the public, to review any proposal that affects the land use of the City. The ULURP establishes time frames in which the various governmental organizations must review and vote upon the proposed land use application. These governmental organs are the Community Board, the Borough President, the City Panning Commission, and the City Council, which has the final deciding vote. This is where Robert Jackson is the key. He holds the power. There are two opposing plans on the table the Community 197a Plan developed by the Community Board 9 and Columbia s 197c Plan.
The Columbia 197c Plan will displace over 5000 Black and Latino residents of West Harlem and bring a hazardous biotech lab to the center of a populated area and right next to the Hudson River, making West Harlem a wonderful terrorist target. The Community Board which represents the area has developed a plan for Columbias Expansion that takes the welfare of the community residents into consideration. The Community Boards 197a Plan is one that ensures the welfare of the environment and the people of West Harlem. A comparison of the Community 197a Plan and Columbia 197c Plan can be seen at www.stopcolumbia.org.
Unfortunately, the ULURP Process is a sham. Although Community Board 9, the organ which truly represents the pulse of the people of West Harlem, has been almost unanimous in its support of the 197a Plan, many of the Citys current and former Black elected officials have come out on the side of Columbias 197c Plan.
Columbia has not been engaged with the community but rather has implemented a strategy of using Black star power to push through its agenda. Columbia has hired a high powered democratic consulting firm, thus ensuring leverage over the Citys local democratic politicians. BlackBallot.com writer Keisha Saul wrote a groundbreaking investigative report on the issue for the July 22 issue of The Weekly Report. The New York Post published its own article on the unscrupulous tactics that Columbia has utilized on September 19, 2007.
On August 20 of this year, a Community Board 9 public hearing was held. Columbias consulting firm solicited the assistance of Rev. Williams of the Addicts Rehabilitation Center ARC which is located in East Harlem. During the hearing, ARC planted a number of its clients in the crowd as proColumbia demonstrators. This is something I witnessed first hand. While passing out literature at the hearing, I was approached by one of the members of ARC who told me that he had been holding a proColumbia sign. He explained that only after an older man from Harlem Community Board 9 scolded him for his actions,
he only then learned what was actually taking place. The ARC client, who lives in Mt. Vernon, expressed regret over holding the sign without knowing the issues it represented.
Local elected officials have ignored local activist groups such as the Coalition to Preserve Community and allowed Columbias consultants to weave an image of support from the local community for Columbias expansion.
Furthermore, I was scheduled to testify at Borough President Scott Stringers hearing on September 19, but once there I was ignored like several other community residents. The Borough President was unnecessarily hostile towards the crowd and seemed intent on provoking an angry response in order to shut the hearing down. In fact, Columbias President Lee Bollinger stated on NY1 the night before the hearing that Scott Stringer was supporting the Columbia plan. Less than ten days later, Stringer announced that he had reached his own scaled down version of a Community Benefits Agreement with Columbia, the details of which have not been made public. Scott Stringer has a representative on the Local Development Corporation
LDC, the nonprofit entity established to
negotiate with Columbia. By negotiating directly with Columbia, Stringer has undermined the community negotiation process of the LDC and, most importantly,
denied the citizens of West Harlem the right to a democratic process.
The City Council is the last hope for the people. The City Planning Commission established a West Harlem Local Development Corporation to negotiate directly with Columbia. The process is confusing by design. The City Planning Commission sets up the LDC to negotiate with the Columbia, but then they approve Columbias plan before they allow the LDC to negotiate. It was not until I interviewed Councilman Jackson on September 19 that I knew of the West Harlem LDCs existence.
www.westharlemldc.org Since then, I've watched the entire corrupt process unfold.
Scott Stringer and George W. Bush are cut from the same racist cloth. He would have never done what he did uptown if he were downtown or in Community Board 7 Upper West Side, but this is Harlem and who cares if poor Black and Latino people are denied their rights. If the LDC is unable to negotiate a deal with Columbia, which is becoming obvious that they wont. The LDC is supposed to establish a Community Benefits Agreement with Columbia. If the local elected officials negotiate directly with Columbia it eliminates any leverage the LDC will have in its negotiation process with Columbia to secure concessions for the community. In fact, three members of the LDC  Tom DeMott, Nick Sprayregen, and Luisa Henriquez just
resigned on November 28 out of disgust and in protest of the process which has been totally rigged from the start.
Robert Jackson will indeed be the one to enter into and decide final negotiations with Columbia as he states in the video. He is the man that holds the future of Harlem in his hands. I just hope he holds onto to it for his people instead of giving it away to Columbia.
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 No Dew No Rain Pastor James Mannings Quest To Save Harlem
By C.B. Forde
I am not someone who goes to Church, but I do believe in God and the importance of some sort of spiritual foundation in ones life. While walking across 125th and Amsterdam a few weeks ago, I noticed churchgoers passing out flyers. I took one, and I must say I was impressed finally, the true spirit of the Black Church is being reborn. Lets just say that I have been a little disappointed by the current spiritual leadership of Black America. Pastor Manning and his No Dew No Rain campaign seemed a refreshing alternative to the current spiritual and political leadership of Harlem.
No Dew No Rain is Pastor Mannings battle cry for the indigenous people of Harlem. As Pastor Manning wrote, We are losing our only homeland for Black people worldwide. Harlem is our Mecca it cannot be given to the Europeans. Our local Black politicians who speak with forked tongues have sold our homeland to the banks and foreign developers. They are pushing us out everyday by using a police state to destroy our culture. That was enough to hook me I had to meet this man. I went to the website www.atlah.org and scheduled an interview with Pastor Manning at his churchATLAH World Missionary Church on 38 West 123rd Street in Harlem, New York.
I must say that I was not disappointed. Pastor Manning is an honest and insightful man. He came right out and stated that Harlem needed a political change. He explained that Black leadership, led at one time by Mayor David Dinkins and presently by Representative Charles Rangel, has failed the Black residents of Harlem miserably. He continued by pointing out that the programs that these leaders and other Black government officials have initiated did not meet the needs of the average Harlem resident. In fact, the Black leadership across America has failed miserably after the death of Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. The Affirmative Action programs that were created after Dr. Kings death did not carry on the spirit of the Civil Rights Era. Pastor Manning feels that the community is lost because the generations growing up after the destruction of the Black family structure are continually regressing into abject poverty and disfunctionality.
We then talked about the movie American Gangster, Pastor Mannings words caused me to reflect. I came to a deep conclusion. Although I had grown up in Harlem, I am still an immigrant from the Caribbean. I have been living in Harlem for the last 30 years of my life, since 1976. Pastor Manning painted a picture of Harlem pre1968 in which the Black family was intact, a scene which neither I nor my family had ever witnessed. Pastor Manning painted a picture of Harlem that I had been familiar with only through movies. He pointed out that drug addiction was also an issue in pre1968 Harlem, but after the death of Dr. King, everything fell apart. American Gangster vividly recalls this period19681975, the Vietnam Era. African/Black family values remained intact up until this period of time.
Pastor Manning then made an interesting point about how Black Americans had not dealt well with the opportunities that were presented to them in the post Civil Rights Era. He pointed out that it was during the Vietnam Era that drug dealing became glamorized in the Black community. Pastor Manning was extremely critical of the Black leadership after Dr. Kings death, describing those leaders as individuals who do not have true love for their people. He describes the current leadership as being individuals only interested in personal gain and having contempt for their own. Black America was not prepared to take advantage of President Johnson's Great Society programs. Pastor Manning passionately pointed out that while certain individual Black Americans have benefited from Affirmative Action programs, the larger community has fallen apart.
Manning said, We didnt know what to do with new civil rights freedoms. Harlem is the greatest example of this. Black people held Harlem for years and years and are now loosing it. He went on to compare the loss of Harlem with the lost of who we are as a people. We have, lost our way as a culture.
I must say it was a privilege to meet Pastor Manning and to be given the opportunity to help spread his ideas to the greater public. Pastor Manning is calling for a threeyear boycott until 2010 of all nonAfrican American owned banks, businesses, stores, and fast food places that are located in Harlem from 110th Street to 155th Street. www.cu strike.blogspot.com His aim is to drive these businesses out of Harlem and then encourage local Harlem residents to rebuild the community from within. No Dew No Rain means dont provide the outside influencers with any economic resources. By spearheading the boycott, Pastor Manning is encouraging a dryup of nonHarlem resident businesses and placing the power back in our communitys hands.
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Bill Perkins Provides Outstanding Leadership For Harlem
Reprinted from the September 16, 2007 Edition
The New York Times
OpEd Section
Big Man Off Campus
By Bill Perkins
WE have an affordable housing crisis in New York City. And yet imagine what would happen if a publicly operated affordable housing agency got the goahead to seize a parcel of land on Columbia Universitys campus to build apartments for lowincome residents of Harlem.
Sounds absurd, doesnt it But why After all, eminent domain laws let government entities condemn private property for things that are a benefit to the public, like the construction of a highway or a watertreatment plant.
But what conventional opinion doesnt find absurd is that Columbia University, a private entity, has contemplated invoking eminent domain to seize private property and expand its campus in West Harlem.
For now, Columbia insists eminent domain would have only a minimal role in its 17acre growth plan since the university already holds title to most of the properties within its development footprint.
Such assurances, however, do little to ease public concern. In August, Community Board 9 voted to overwhelmingly oppose Columbias expansion plan unless the university disavows the possibility of using eminent domain among other conditions.
This brings me back to my original question Why is the notion of taking Columbias land for a public use like affordable housing laughable while the inverse is viewed as wholly reasonable
It all comes down to the distorted values of what constitutes public good as understood through our eminent domain laws. When powerful interests so twist and bend the law to match preconceived notions of public benefit, then the most reasonable proposal begins to seem the most absurd, and vice versa.
Perhaps the absurdity resides in the law itself, and how it is applied. Clearly we need to shift our thinking about the appropriate use of eminent domain. Unfortunately, weve become comfortable slanting the law in favor of the big guys interests over those of the little guy.
Take, for instance, the United States Supreme Courts ruling two years ago in Kelo v. City of New London. The court ended up narrowly siding with New London, Conn., in its use of eminent domain to condemn houses and businesses for economic development purposes associated with a Pfizer research site nearby. Here, again, a public entity New London served as the armor for a land grab by private interests. And the court accepted it.
A similar kind of shell game is apparent in Columbias proposed expansion, with New York State potentially supplying the public shield. In 2004, Charles Gargano, then the chairman of New Yorks Empire State Development Corporation, signed onto a letter by Columbia officials requesting that the corporation serve as the public agent of its West Harlem property condemnation plan.
I support discussions between Columbia and community leaders about ways the universitys expansion can benefit residents of Harlem, especially young people, through the construction of a community center or the development of student recruitment programs. But concessions like these can in no way justify the taking of private property.
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American Gangster The Art of the Gangster
By Justin Mitchell
Generally speaking, American film is not art. The greatest American directors rank far below their counterparts in Europe and Asia. This is because American film is not serious in the way that art should be.
The vast majority of American films, even those with pretensions toward art, are designed to make their audiences forget about their troubles. They are designed to reaffirm our faith in "conventional
wisdom," age old wisdom about truth, justice, and The American Way. They are, in short, meant to make us feel good. But great art is rarely built on sociological cliches and easy platitudes. Great art
upsets and challenges our comforting ideas about existence. Great art is unsettling and propelled by the conviction of its creator. Who can doubt for a moment Federico Fellinis conviction in The Nights of
Cabriria Who can doubt Imamuras conviction in Vengeance is Mine Who can doubt Bergmans conviction in The Virgin Spring All of these artists dealt with great moral issues without sentimentality,
without fear. They were, in that sense, openly political.
I say all of this to show that the recently released American Gangster is far from an anomaly in American cinema and because the film itself, from the title to its treatment of its subject matter,
asks us to contemplate, although not too seriously, what it means to be an American. Make no mistake, the moment you sit down in that theater, you are watching an American film about American society both
past and present. Thus American Gangster is not a work of art by any stretch of the imagination. It relies heavily on gangster movie tropes, journalistic plotting, and slick images. The film is based on
the extraordinary story of Frank Lucas, a Harlem drug kingpin who quietly ran an efficient, closeknit, and sophisticated operation that oddly enough symbolically calls into question stereotypes about black
inferiority while reinforcing stereotypes about black pathology.
Lucas story says a lot about America. As Mark Jacobson put it in his profile of Lucas for the Village Voice, which was the inspiration for the film, if Lucas had been born under different circumstances i.e.
had he been white and middle class he would have probably been a crooked stock broker or politician. But Lucas was born poor and black in the American South and never even learned to read. Denzel
Washington plays Lucas with his usual aplomb, mixing country boy inflection with uptown urbanity. His performance is one of the principal reasons one should see the movie. Lucas story shows how
less scrupulous blacks who were products of Jim Crow America made something out of nothing, albeit often at the expense of their own kind. This, of course, differs little from the CEO who robs his own
employees of their pensions. Yet in American Gangster black criminality receives its typical hypocritical lashing at the hands of white virtue embodied by Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crow, an
incorruptible cop. It is the usual schematic assault on black masculinity in American media. Although Lucas is intelligent, he is still without a soul, at least in the movie, and this, naturally, is
contrasted with Roberts staid sense of civic duty and good conscience. Roberts becomes the instrument for Lucas moral salvation and by the end of the film all of our ideas about justice in Americagood and evil, right and wrongare left comfortably in tact.
A better, more sensitive not sympathetic portrait of Frank Lucas can be found in Mark Jacobsons essay American Gangster which depicts a man who may have stifled his conscience to fulfill a callow American
dream. The real Frank Lucas cried at his trial when he was forced to hear testimony from the mother of a girl whose life had been destroyed by his trademarked brand of heroin, Blue Magic. The real life Frank
Lucas, in addition to having lived a life as a ruthless gangster, also raised several kids and his existence seems to laugh in the face of our traditional notions of good and evil. Jacobson paints him as a
flawless manipulator, a likeable guy who winces and cowers when confronted with the damage he has done. As I left the theater after watching Ridley Scotts adaptation of Jacobsons brilliant profile, I
wondered what someone like Spike Lee would have done with similar material. I suspect he would have tried to capture the psychology of Lucas in all of its subtlety without letting America off of the hook
as Scott does. In Scotts film, there is no sense of what America was like for black people during Lucas heyday, no real examination of his inner being and the profundity of his success, no interest shown in
the politics behind the war on drugs, and little depiction of the effect that drugs and policing had on black communities back then. No real sense of 1970s Harlem emerges from the film either. Scotts world
is surface, all story and style, a cliched romp that terminates in a wrathful, moralistic orgy of black bloodshed. It is one of the most historical movies about a historical figure I have ever seen.
But that is not the point. Scott is comfortable making your standard American film. People will be dazzled by his music video techniques and his graphic displays of violence. Few will be dismayed by his failure to confront the political implications of his materialand it is fraught with them. In the end most people will be comfortable with a story in which justice is served, corrupt cops take a fall, black criminals die or go to jail, and a white man maintains his moral superiority. If Scott were interested in making a work of art out of the material he would have produced something along the lines of The Wire, which is the single greatest achievement of American television, perhaps even of American filmmaking in general. But I suppose there can only be so much art in America at a time.
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Columbia Students Go On Hunger Strike To Protest Expansion
Official website www.custrike.blogspot.com
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Statement from the Strikers
Why We Strike...
We are on hunger strike because we want change and because we believe that change is worth sacrifice. We strike against a university that seems not to care for the wellbeing of its students or of its community. We strike because we feel the urgency of a student voice that is continually being marginalized. We strike because we dont want students in the future to have to resort to drastic measures to affect change in this institution.
We strike because student input on these issues in meetings, through protests, and through other avenues of vocalization has been ignored or patronized, and the response to our demands for change has been woefully insufficient. We strike because we abhor, viscerally, the failure of current administrators to address student concerns on these issues and because this failure constitutes violence against our intellect. We strike because these are not matters that will, nor can, wait.
We have no more words for this university administration. Hunger striking is an ideal course of action because it does not inflict harm on others moreover, it offers strikers the opportunity for introspection and selfexamination. We strike for the opportunity to reflect. We are peaceful.
We strike because we have inherited a world in which racist, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies dominate the way power flows. We strike because the administration consistently resists implementing structural changes that will allow us to challenge these hierarchies. We strike because the university does not recognize that the lack of space for the critical study of race through Ethnic Studies, the lack of administrative support for minority students and their concerns, the lack of engagement with the community in West Harlem, and the lack of true reform of the Core Curriculum are harmful to the intellectual life of its students. We strike because we want the administration to understand that these needs are as fundamental to students intellectual lives as food is to the human body.
We strike to reimagine the university as a more democratic place, where individuals are not isolated until communities are attacked, where we are at school in the City of New York, not making New York City more like this school, where students have a deciding say in this university, and where we are not called to a civilizing mission, but rather, to a process of liberation.
We are not striking to be martyrs for anyone or for any cause. We know that some may misunderstand our actions, but we strike with the faith that students questioning, challenging, and taking their own actions to shift the dangerous path that this university is pursuing should serve more to unite us than to divide us.
There has been tremendous unrest on campus this semester, these past few years, this past decade. And people here feel psychically hurt by Columbias indifference to our heartache, to our struggle, to our rumbling need for a better university. With luck, Columbia will see the starvation of our bodies as a bellwether of our growing desperation on this campus. Its a shame that Columbia was not more alarmed when we said our minds, hearts, and spirits were starving, too.
November 16, 2007
In response to the concerns of the Coalition to Preserve Community and prominent community members for the Columbia University hunger strikers health, the remaining hunger strikers will break their fast at tonights 9pm vigil. Although, at the urging of community members, they will change their form of protest, the individuals who have been on strike and those who have mobilized around this movement are committed to continuing their struggle for an ethical expansion by Columbia into West Harlem.
Negotiations on the strikers demands relating to Columbias expansion took place yesterday. The administrations response to student demands was patronizing, and led to nothing but a restating of the universitys current positions, demonstrating continual resistance to engaging in constructive discussion with its students. Ryan Fukumori, CC09 and a student negotiator, noted that, on the issue of expansion, This administration is in a moral crisis when its financial interests surpass the greater needs of the community. He added, Despite significant advancements made in the areas of administrative and curricular reform, we have unfortunately not seen the same cooperative attitude from administrators on the topic of expansion.
Community members have expressed their greatest appreciation for the student movement that escalated into a hunger strike ten days ago. The administrations appreciation for the community is less apparent community members were asked by present officials to leave the gathering of silent observers at yesterdays negotiation. It had been agreed at student insistence that negotiations would be made public, but it had not been explicitly specified whether community members were included in this agreement.
Students maintained their resolve over their demands regarding Columbias expansion. The points brought by students to the negotiations yesterday were compromises from the students original positions. Demands include that Columbia take eminent domain completely off the table that it promise to negotiate with tenants and the Local Development Corporation rather than landlords and city politicians and that resources be allocated to creating affordable housing for the 5035 people who are living in unsubsidized housing in the area of expansion.
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