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Cooper Green Forum in Bessemer Focuses on Forming New Healthcare Authority to Ensure Care for All
Tonight's forum explores creating a nonpolitical healthcare authority for Jefferson County, and securing more primary care doctors for Cooper Green patients, particularly those with chronic conditions.
Cooper Green Solutions: New Healthcare Authority
Thursday, August 29, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
WaterMark Place (next to Alabama Adventure)
4500 Katie's Way, Bessemer, AL 35022
A healthcare authority – divorced from politics and designed by medical and business professionals – plus more money to pay for existing primary care services, are some ways to help patients caught in the fallout of changes at what was Cooper Green Mercy Hospital.
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BABJ Honors Civil Rights Media Pioneers in Sept. 6 Gala with Don Lemon
As the Birmingham commemorates the 50th anniversary of its pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement, the Birmingham Association of Black Journalists is recognizing the news media’s equally important role in covering the Movement.
EVENT INFO: CNN’s Don Lemon, a former Birmingham anchor, is the featured speaker. Our honorees include Emory O. Jackson, crusading editor of the Birmingham World newspaper, Shelley Stewart, entrepreneur and radio personality and Jessie Lewis, Sr., publisher of The Birmingham Times. The three will receive special recognition for their heroics in covering events that affected the black community during a period when other media outlets did not. PRICE: $75 per person, $1,000 per table*
Register online HERE
EVENT INFO: The conference features Pulitzer Prize winning author Hank Klibanoff, whose book, “The Race Beat,” chronicles how the media covered the civil rights movement from Brown vs. the Board of Education to the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Also former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones will discuss the role the media played in bringing the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers to justice. PRICE: Admission is free, but registration is required. An optional $10 box lunch will also be available. *Proceeds go to the BABJ Scholarship Fund.
Register online HERE
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From the Blog: Our Heroes Are In The Mirror
Fifty years ago, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, the last one delivered on August 28, 1963, the day more than a quarter million supporters of civil rights converged in the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Alas, I did not get to D.C. for the 50th year commemorative events. Instead, I lived vicariously through the stories of friends who did. I enjoyed news accounts of those who returned 50 years later to marvel at far the country has come since the historic march, and how much further we have to go to realize the powerful words in Dr. King’s speech.
Dr. King and the event organizers undoubtedly understood the power of what they were doing, speaking under watchful gaze of President Abraham Lincoln’s great seated statue. The historic march came in the 100th year anniversary of Lincoln’s signing the Emancipation Proclamation, which strategically freed most Black slaves during the Civil War.
With that historic backdrop, the march and the speech became a landmark spectacle in American history. It was a grand demonstration organized by a network of brave men and women, foot soldiers who committed their lives to the hard work of advancing civil rights for African Americans, and human rights for society’s poor and marginalized people.
USA Today has a wonderful special edition that delves into that historic speech and how the march came to be.
But as the USA Today edition says and Dr. Michael Eric Dyson explained in a C-SPAN interview this morning, the speech has been frozen in time and its deliverer stuck in amber. Our sound-bite society often misquotes his speech without understanding its historical context . And without that, the speech is robbed of its power and meaning.
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