The Innocence Project reported in the most recent issue of its magazine that a record nine clients were exonerated and released from prison in 2018 for crimes they didn’t commit.
Maddy deLone, the Innocence Project’s executive director, wrote in Spring 2019 issue of “The Innocence Project in Print” that the nine exonerations were most at one time in Innocence Project’s 26- year history.
Exonerations continued into 2019 with three more men being released from prison for crimes they didn’t commit.
The incarcerations took a problematic toll on the 12 men who were locked behind bars for a total of nearly 300 years. “Time away from their homes, families and loved ones cannot be replaced,” deLone wrote.
Gregory Counts, one of the exonerated said, “I want to jail when I was 19. I did 26 years—over half of my life in jail. I need to see the world.”
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. vacated rape, sodomy and kidnapping charges against Counts after a woman who claimed she was the victim admitted to lying. Semen and other physical evidence eliminated Counts as a suspect.
Malcolm Alexander, another exoneree, said, “freedom is a new life. It’s like being reborn. It’s giving a chance to live a life I had been denied.”
Prison officials locked Alexander behind bars for 38 years for a rape he didn’t commit. A judge sentenced Alexander to life in Angola Prison in Angola, Louisiana, the country’s most-notorious prison and former plantation, when he was 21.
The Innocence Project determined Alexander’s attorney was incompetent.
Genetic testing eventually eliminated him as the rape suspect. He left prison with a smile on his face and his black pet Labrador Retriever named “Innocent.”
In another matter, New York created the first ever state-wide commission to study prosecutorial misconduct, such a failure to disclose or discrimination in jury selection.
Attacks on the race of Sen. Kamala Harris’, D-Calif., suggesting she is not African American, have brought fellow Democratic presidential primary candidates to her defense, The Washington Post reports.
“The attacks against @KamalaHarris are racist and ugly,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tweeted Saturday. “We all have an obligation to speak out and say so. And it’s within the power and obligation of tech companies to stop these vile lies dead in their tracks.”
Warren was pointing to Internet and social media reports rebuking Sen. Harris because she is not African American because she is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. Warren is one of Harris’ chief presidential primary rivals, but she too has been criticized for her claims of distant Native American heritage.
“This stuff is really vile and everyone should speak out against it,” Sen. Harris spokeswoman Lily Adams tweeted.
Adams tweet linked to The Daily Beast report outlining a rebuke of Sen. Harris as not being an “American black,” a claim that was retweeted –but since deleted – by President Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., according to The New York Times.
“Donald Trump Jr. is a racist too. Shocker,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted.
Among the other Democratic primary candidates, rushing to the defense of one of the surging rivals:
· Former Vice President Joe Biden: “The same forces of hatred rooted in ‘birtherism’ that questioned @BarackObama’s American citizenship, and even his racial identity, are now being used against Senator @KamalaHarris. It’s disgusting and we have to call it out when we see it. Racism has no place in America.”
· South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: “The presidential competitive field is stronger because Kamala Harris has been powerfully voicing her Black American experience. Her first-generation story embodies the American dream. It’s long past time to end these racist, birther-style attacks.”
· Gov. Jay Inslee, D-Wash.: “The coordinated smear campaign on Senator @KamalaHarris is racist and vile. The Trump family is peddling birtherism again and it’s incumbent on all of us to speak out against it.”
· Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.: “These troll-fueled racist attacks on Senator @KamalaHarris are unacceptable. We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against this type of vile behavior.”
Sen. Harris directly challenge Dem frontrunner Biden’s social justice record in Thursday night’s debate, which led to a surge of anti-Harris tweets within minutes, according to Caroline Orr, a behavioral scientist who studies disinformation campaigns online.
(TriceEdneyWire.com/GIN) – Lending institutions fear that Kenya’s foot may be stuck on the debt pedal with the latest loan in the amount of $750 million from the World Bank to be paid over 30 years.
A number of experts and players in the financial sector do not think all is well.
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The Central Bank, which is the government’s banker, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya (ICPAK) and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) all say Kenya’s debt position is getting to dangerous levels and the country must engage a lower gear before it is too late.
Financial analysts and economists have also raised concern on the speed at which Kenya is borrowing – a sign of the country’s rapidly deteriorating cash-flow situation.
The IEA, an economic think tank, recently warned that Kenya risks defaulting on its debt obligations in a decade if the current appetite for borrowing remains unchecked. The government has since defended the increased borrowing alluding to demand in investing in infrastructures such as roads and railways.
Critics have however questioned the government’s debt binge saying this is likely to lead to heavy taxation of Kenyans in order to pay debts when the demand arises.
Kenya’s debt repayments to both internal and external creditors have increased by 50 per cent over the past year with net servicing charges for both internal and external debt up by 48.2 per cent, the 2019 Edition of the Economic Survey says.
This comes even as the Government is in China to negotiate additional loans that are expected to push up the country’s debt owed to China to record levels.
China now accounts for 70 per cent of the country’s external debt, with Kenya now owing the Asian nation more than twice the amount of money Kenya owes Germany, Japan, France, USA and Belgium combined.
Kenya has borrowed heavily from China to fund a $4.8 billion railway project, the country’s largest infrastructure project since its independence from Britain in 1963.
As a result, Kenya’s debt servicing costs will consume one-third of the government’s revenues this year, according to the Nairobi-based Institute of Economic Affairs. That is one of the highest ratios in sub-Saharan Africa.
By Mark Hedin, Ethnic Media News Services Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Ethnic Media Services
Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Ethnic Media Services 2020 Census logo (TriceEdneyWire.com) – The Census Bureau has said it expects to hire about a half-million people nationwide to help in its all-important counting of everybody living in the United States, something the government has done every 10 years since 1790. That half-million hiring target is a sizable decrease from the last census, in 2010, when the bureau was more dependent on shoe leather than silicon to get the work done. Instead of the 635,000 people hired in 2010 to knock on doors to fill out questionnaires with people who hadn’t gotten theirs to the mailbox, in 2020, for the first time, the government is counting on people filling out their forms online. The half-million Census Bureau jobs are open to any U.S. citizen who can pass a background check, is at least 18 and possesses a Social Security number. In California, census officials project they will fill or already have filled about 12,800 positions. “It’s a relatively fluid number, just a projection,” said Celeste Jimenez, assistant regional census manager based in Los Angeles. That’s because for “enumerators,” the biggest category of census workers, the number of people hired will depend on how many people didn’t complete their census questionnaires promptly next year, leading the Census Bureau to hire people who know their communities and languages and can go out into the field and come back with completed questionnaires from the non-responders. This year, the Census Bureau is focused on setting up and staffing offices across the country and checking and updating the list of addresses used to send people reminders and instructions on filling out the 2020 Census questionnaire online when it is released in mid-March. The next wave of hiring, for “listers” who will do the address verification work this year, is under way. Those jobs pay from $16.50 to $33 per hour and are expected to last only for a couple of months, including paid training. To apply for these positions, go to https://2020census.gov/en/jobs.html. Yolanda Lazcano, recruiting coordinator for the “Los Angeles Region” ꟷ which covers the entire West Coast from California to Alaska, plus Hawaii, Idaho and Nevada is hoping to recruit 11,000 applicants for approximately 3,500 lister positions in California. Next year, after mailings are sent out with instructions on the legally required process of filling out the census questionnaires, the biggest wave of hiring will begin: for “field staff” or “enumerators” to do the “non-response follow-up” work that in large part consists of knocking on doors at addresses where residents didn’t file completed questionnaires. These positions also will be filled through the Census Bureau website: https://2020census.gov/en/jobs.html. The Census Bureau hopes that having people file their questionnaires online will yield billions of dollars in savings on the shoe leather it’s always needed to get those questionnaires completed. It expects at least half of the country’s more than 300 million people to take the online option. Nonetheless, Lazcano expects that each of California’s 30 census offices will need about 300 enumerators. In the past, with questionnaires submitted through snail mail, the cost per person of gathering census data had grown to $92 in 2010, from just $16 in 1970, as measured in constant dollars. The ability to bridge language barriers will be invaluable, and in fact is a requirement for some of the managerial positions the Census Bureau still has open in California, such as this one for a Spanish speaker in Bakersfield (https://census.gov/about/census-careers/opportunities/positions/region-field/cfm/LARO-CFM-CA22.html) or this one for a Chinese-language speaker in the Contra Costa County city of Concord: (https://census.gov/about/census-careers/opportunities/positions/region-field/cfm/LARO-CFM-CA47.html). (The application period for those two positions closes June 14.) The Census Bureau is touting its jobs as ideal for people just starting their working life who need to establish a record of reliability, for people who can use the frequently evening or weekend hours to supplement jobs they already have, or for retirees who would like to re-enter the workforce in a limited way. As for the background checks, Lazcano said that hiring will be on a case by case basis, so having a felony conviction, for instance, isn’t necessarily a disqualifier. Lazcano said bilingual census staff will be needed wherever 5% or more of a community is believed to primarily use another language. Payday comes every week and people using their cars will be reimbursed. Although the jobs are in most cases temporary, the work occasionally can lead to a career.million people nationwide to help in its all-important counting of everybody living in the United States, something the government has done every 10 years since 1790. That half-million hiring target is a sizable decrease from the last census, in 2010, when the bureau was more dependent on shoe leather than silicon to get the work done. Instead of the 635,000 people hired in 2010 to knock on doors to fill out questionnaires with people who hadn’t gotten theirs to the mailbox, in 2020, for the first time, the government is counting on people filling out their forms online. The half-million Census Bureau jobs are open to any U.S. citizen who can pass a background check, is at least 18 and possesses a Social Security number. In California, census officials project they will fill or already have filled about 12,800 positions. “It’s a relatively fluid number, just a projection,” said Celeste Jimenez, assistant regional census manager based in Los Angeles. That’s because for “enumerators,” the biggest category of census workers, the number of people hired will depend on how many people didn’t complete their census questionnaires promptly next year, leading the Census Bureau to hire people who know their communities and languages and can go out into the field and come back with completed questionnaires from the non-responders. This year, the Census Bureau is focused on setting up and staffing offices across the country and checking and updating the list of addresses used to send people reminders and instructions on filling out the 2020 Census questionnaire online when it is released in mid-March. The next wave of hiring, for “listers” who will do the address verification work this year, is under way. Those jobs pay from $16.50 to $33 per hour and are expected to last only for a couple of months, including paid training. To apply for these positions, go to https://2020census.gov/en/jobs.html. Yolanda Lazcano, recruiting coordinator for the “Los Angeles Region” ꟷ which covers the entire West Coast from California to Alaska, plus Hawaii, Idaho and Nevada is hoping to recruit 11,000 applicants for approximately 3,500 lister positions in California. Next year, after mailings are sent out with instructions on the legally required process of filling out the census questionnaires, the biggest wave of hiring will begin: for “field staff” or “enumerators” to do the “non-response follow-up” work that in large part consists of knocking on doors at addresses where residents didn’t file completed questionnaires. These positions also will be filled through the Census Bureau website: https://2020census.gov/en/jobs.html. The Census Bureau hopes that having people file their questionnaires online will yield billions of dollars in savings on the shoe leather it’s always needed to get those questionnaires completed. It expects at least half of the country’s more than 300 million people to take the online option. Nonetheless, Lazcano expects that each of California’s 30 census offices will need about 300 enumerators. In the past, with questionnaires submitted through snail mail, the cost per person of gathering census data had grown to $92 in 2010, from just $16 in 1970, as measured in constant dollars. The ability to bridge language barriers will be invaluable, and in fact is a requirement for some of the managerial positions the Census Bureau still has open in California, such as this one for a Spanish speaker in Bakersfield (https://census.gov/about/census-careers/opportunities/positions/region-field/cfm/LARO-CFM-CA22.html) or this one for a Chinese-language speaker in the Contra Costa County city of Concord: (https://census.gov/about/census-careers/opportunities/positions/region-field/cfm/LARO-CFM-CA47.html). (The application period for those two positions closes June 14.) The Census Bureau is touting its jobs as ideal for people just starting their working life who need to establish a record of reliability, for people who can use the frequently evening or weekend hours to supplement jobs they already have, or for retirees who would like to re-enter the workforce in a limited way. As for the background checks, Lazcano said that hiring will be on a case by case basis, so having a felony conviction, for instance, isn’t necessarily a disqualifier. Lazcano said bilingual census staff will be needed wherever 5% or more of a community is believed to primarily use another language. Payday comes every week and people using their cars will be reimbursed. Although the jobs are in most cases temporary, the work occasionally can lead to a career.
Rev. Martin Luther King, at Atlanta Univ. for SCLC-sponsored student conf. (Photo by Howard Sochurek//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
TriceEdneyWire.com) – In 1970, only two years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his widow Coretta Scott King received the horrific news that haters had shot into her husband’s crypt in Atlanta, using it for target practice. Though grieved by the news, she conceded it was an omen that even in his grave the assassination of Dr. King would continue by fabrications and vile assaults on her husband’s character. To her, the words, “you can kill the dream, but not the dreamer,” were not just a catchy mantra. She used them to brace her for the backlash she feared would come. The recent trove of salacious and ill-reported old rumors being bandied about by Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow falls seamlessly into that anticipated outcome. Mrs. King who died in 2006 had often shared with me her distrust of Garrow because of his close ties to the F.B.I., an agency that has historically schemed to nullify Black leaders and according to former FBI agent Donald Wilson, agents cheered in the Atlanta bureau upon news of his death.. The controversial information was obtained from F.B.I. bugging of hotel visits as Dr. King traveled across the country. The newest scandalous claims, according to an FBI agent, place Dr. King in a hotel room when a minister friend of his, now deceased, raped a woman, and King “looked on, laughed and offered advice” and that he also fathered a child with a mistress. The information Garrow reportedly uncovered was recently reported in Standpoint, a conservative British magazine along with an article labeling King a “sexual predator” and “the Harvey Weinstein of the civil rights movement.” As the news reverberated in London, Keith Magee, a senior scholar at the University College London(UCL) expressed his outrage. “This is part of the right wing’s offensive to dismantle and destroy everything revered by people of color. As President Trump visited London, certain people couldn’t bear to see a Black man being more respected than Trump, so there was a move to destroy Dr. King’s image.” Meanwhile, several right-wing news outlets are blowing up the fabricated scandal; in one instance calling for the dismantling of Dr. King’s statue on the mall in the nation’s capital. Clayborne Carson is King’s biography and oversees the Dr. King records headquartered at Stanford University. He says he has seen the same information Garrow has but reached a different conclusion. “None of this is new. Garrow is talking about a recently added summary of a transcript of a 1964 recording from the Willard Hotel that others, including Mrs. King, have said they did not hear Martin’s voice on in. The added summary was four layers removed from the actual recording. This supposedly new information comes from an anonymous source in a single paragraph in an F.B.I. report. You have to ask how could anyone conclude King looked at a rape from an audio recording in a room where he was not present.” In my Coretta King memoir, “My Life, My Love, My Legacy, “ she talked about this material mailed to her home on Nov. 2, 1964, that her sources later confirmed were dispatched by the F.B I. “I set up our reel-to-reel recorder and listened. I have read scores of reports talking about the scurrilous activities of my husband but once again, there was nothing at all incriminating on the tape. It was a social event with people laughing and telling dirty jokes. But I did not hear Martin’s voice on it, and there was nothing about sex or anything else resembling the lies J. Edgar and the F.B.I. were spreading.” Although she and other aides dismissed the tape, she could not dismiss the poorly typed letter in the package, suggesting the information to be released to the press was so damaging King should commit suicide. It read: “King we’ve found you out… You are done for there is only one way out.. You have thirty- four days before you are exposed and publicly defamed.” What should be made clear is the letter was sent 34 days before Martin was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize but was not opened until the couple returned from the Nobel ceremonies in Norway. Mrs. King said that Hoover hated Dr. King and was outraged that King was receiving the honor he felt he deserved. “Our source told us Hoover had ordered the doctored tape to be sent to me in the hopes I would divorce Martin, which would bring him down. Despite all the rumors, Martin and I did not take the bait.” Believing the FBI is a friend of Black people would require amnesia as the agency has historically worked to nullify and destroy Black leaders, author Anthony Summers says in his Hoover biography entitled “Official and Confidential.” The long list includes orchestrating the jailing and deportation of the fiery Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey, bugging and blackballing the great singer Paul Robeson, the ruthless assault on the Black Panthers and the well-documented COINTELPRO, the FBI program waged in the 1960’s to prevent the rise of a Black Messiah, generally thought to be Dr. King. Over the years, Mrs. King has defended her husband’s reputation attesting he was faithful to his marriage. Others, however, such as Carson, a historian, do not put King in a category of perfection. “There are no perfect men, but it is still wrong to use undocumented, tainted evidence to smear a man when history shows that many men with documented sordid private lives, still remain heroes.” While the scandal is brewing, the words of Mrs. King are worth remembering: They may kill the dreamer, but Dr. King’s dream of diversity and justice will outlive his enemies. Dr. Barbara Reynolds a former editorial writer and columnist for USA TODAY, has written for numerous publications, such as The Washington Post, Essence Magazine, Playboy Magazine, and the Trice Edney News Wire. She is an author of seven books. The latest is Coretta Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy.
Karen Baynes-Dunning, SPLC’s interim president and CEO; Bryan Fair, SPLC Board Chair
Following a tumultuous change in leadership, including the firing of its co-founder and the resignation of its president, the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations, has two African Americans leading the Montgomery, Alabama-based organization.
Bryan Fair, Thomas E. Skinner Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law, is SPLC’s board chairman, and Karen Baynes-Dunning is the organization’s interim president and CEO, succeeding Richard Cohen, who resigned in May in the wake of a scandal precipitated by the ouster of Morris Dees, SPLC’s co-founder.
Baynes-Dunning, who will remain in her position until SPLC completes a nationwide search for a permanent president and CEO, is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley Law School. She also served as a juvenile court judge and as a visiting professor at Emory University School of Law and as an associate professor at the University of Alabama.
After serving for 15 years as president and CEO, Cohen resigned in May. SPLC fired Dees in March.
In a front-page article published in SPLC Report, the organization’s newspaper, Fair said the past few months have been challenging, but he expects the organization to become stronger.
A.G. Gaston, a Black Birmingham millionaire, who is one of the most important heroes of the civil rights movement yet one of the least known and unappreciated, will be honored at 3 p.m. June 30th at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institutein Birmingham, Alabama.
The opening reception is titled “A. G. Gaston: The Man and His Legacy” and it will include a book signing of “Black Titan: A .G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire” by Carol Jenkins,the Emmy award-winning producer and television journalist.
My parents grew up in Birmingham, where my older brother lives, and they told me about Mr. Gaston.
Years later, I read “Black Titan” and learned about the vital role he played in the Birmingham civil rights movement, including bailing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. out of jail. Their friendship in this instance did not stop Gaston and King from nearly coming to blows over some dispute.
Mr. Gaston built a $40 million business empire that included a savings and loan bank, a business college, a construction company, a real estate business, a burial insurance company, two cemeteries, two radio stations and a motel where leaders of the civil rights movement stayed.
Gaston opened a branch of his Citizens Federal Savings Bank in Eutaw, Alabama in 1980 at the urging of Greene County leaders. Gaston’s bank was merged into Citizens Trust Bank, based in Atlanta, Georgia in 2002. Gaston was one of the first advertisers in the Greene County Democrat when it was taken over by Black owners in 1985.
• “The Encyclopedia of Alabama” said Mr. Gaston had a knack for seeing a business need and filling it.
June 17, 2019 (GIN) – Strike! That’s the sound of the world's top two producers of cocoa who say they are suspending their sales for better prices.
The governments of Ivory Coast and Ghana are trying this time-honored strategy to address the imbalance between farmers’ income and money made by foreign commodity markets who scoop up most of the profit.
If the strategy sounds familiar, it’s the same one described in the Greek play Lysistrata where the women withheld affection from their husbands in order to secure peace and end the Peloponnesian War.
Currently, the majority of money does not reach the farmers who live in poverty.
Globally, 85% of the market is controlled by companies such as Kraft, Mars, and Nestle.
But according to Ed C, a journalist, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara and his Ghanaian counterpart Nana Akufo-Addo would do better to focus on processing cocoa beans, rather than just growing them. As with other commodities like diamonds or crude oil, the labor-intensive work happens elsewhere.
Of the $100 billion spent annually on chocolate, the African Development Bank reckons the continent keeps just $5 billion.
A meeting in the Ivory Coast in Abidjan on July 3 will discuss how to implement this measure for the next two years crops.
Father Augustus Tolton, the Roman Catholic Church’s first Black priest, who is slated to become a saint, was forced to attend seminary in Rome because no American school would admit him despite his intellect, special abilities (he spoke several languages) and his devotion to the church because of his race.
Tolton, a former slave from Missouri, attended seminary at The Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide.
Father Augustus Tolton is destined for sainthood
He arrived in Rome on March 21, 1880. Church officials ordained him as a priest on Holy Saturday, April 24, 1885, at Basilica St. Lateran Church in Rome.
Tolton lived in Rome for six years as one of 70 seminarians who attended the school and had come from different parts of the world. The other seminarians called him Gus, for U.S.
What they didn’t call him was “nigger” or go out of their way to make him feel uncomfortable or unwanted, according to his biography.
In his free time, he walked around the neighborhoods of the “Eternal City”, sketching more than 600 churches and the city’s architecture in his artist’s notebook.
Tolton’s career will soon make another dramatic turn.
On Wednesday, Pope Francisapproved a decree recognizing Tolton’s “heroic virtues,” which is a step in the process toward sainthood, following a five-year investigation by the church, which began in 2010 when Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George announced Tolton’s cause for canonization. Pope Francis made Toltonvenerablewithin the church, which is two steps away from canonization.
On November 4, 2011, Chicago dedicated “Honorary Father Augustus Tolton Street.”The honorary street sign is located at the corners of 41st Street between State Street and Michigan Avenue.
Other events honoring Father Tolton also have taken place throughout Chicago, where he founded in 1889 the parish of St. Monica at 36th and Dearborn Streets for black Catholics. He was parish priest until his death in 1897 from heatstroke. Father Tolton was only 43.
Born into slavery
Tolton’s historical journey began on a small plantation in 1854 in Monroe County, Missouri, where slaveholders that owned his family baptized him a Catholic.
In a dangerous escape to the Underground Railroad city of Quincy, Ill., from Missouri, his mother led the family to freedom. Confederate soldiers shot at the family, but no one was wounded.
His father escaped slavery – and probably underwrote the family’s successful escape. He was a member of the Colored Infantry in the Union Army. He reportedly died in a prison camp in Arkansas, according to The Catholic Telegraph, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
After ordination, Father Tolton believed he would be assigned to a parish in Africa because of racism which was sewn deeply into America’s fabric. Catholic leaders, however, had other plans. They sent him to U.S.
Roman Catholic authorities believed it was time America lived up to its self-image as an enlightened, “Christian nation.”He was assigned to St. Peter Church in Quincy, Illinois, where he had grown up after escaping slavery.
When he first arrived in America, however, he gave his first Mass on American soil atSt. Benedict the Moor Churchbefore a majority black congregation in New York City.
It was the first time congregants had seen a Black Catholic priest. Many parishioners traveled from other towns and other states to see and hear him. In Quincy, it was a different story. The new pastor of St. Boniface Church referred to Tolton as that “nigger priest.” The Catholic Church discouraged blacks from attending Mass. In Chicago, priests in white parishes often called blacks “niggers” and told them they weren’t welcome to pray to God among the white Christian worshippers. Blacks were so poor that it was heartbreaking. They attended Mass to keep warm because they did not have shoes or adequate clothing. After three years in Quincy, the Roman Catholic Church reassigned Father Tolton to Chicago. A parade welcomed him to the city. Now the church has opened the door to his sainthood.
He is the first African American elected to the post The Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents has elected Lonnie Bunch III the 14th Smithsonian Secretary effective June 16. Bunch is the first African American, and the first historian elected Secretary of the Smithsonian, which was founded in 1846 with a bequest from British scientist James Smithson. The Washington, D.C.-based Smithsonian is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex with 19 museums and the National Zoological Park. Bunch is founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in September 2016. Previously, Bunch was president of the Chicago Historical Society, one of the nation’s oldest museums of history. “I am humbled and honored to become the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution,” Bunch said. “I am excited to work with the Board of Regents and my colleagues throughout the Institution to build upon its legacy and to ensure that the Smithsonian will be even more relevant and more meaningful and reach more people in the future.”
