Years ago, my parents told Miss Farber, a white 60ish teacher at the elementary school in our Black working-class neighborhood, that when my brother and I graduated they would enroll us in a junior high program for gifted students. “There’s a Hebrew element at that school,” Miss Farber said, “and your children won’t make it.”
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Wei Chen grimaces and shakes his head when talking about how it’s been a hard year for many in Philly’s Asian community. “It’s at the point where many of our elders are afraid to go out,” says Chen, 30, civic engagement coordinator for Asian Americans United (AAU). Wei Chen of Asian Americans United under the
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From seed to supper” sums up the credo of Food Moxie, a Northwest Philadelphia nonprofit that “educates and inspires people to grow, prepare and eat healthy food,” says Lisa Mosca, executive director of this offshoot of Weavers Way Co-op. Launched in 2006, Food Moxie grew from a project where Weavers Way in Mount Airy supplied
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In 2005, soon after my mother died, I spent 17 days hospitalized with ulcerative colitis during the holidays. Instead of champagne, I got two units of blood on New Year’s Eve. I lost 30 of my usual 142 pounds. After discharge, I lacked the strength to stand up and cook, much less go to the
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There’s not a moment to lose, according to Ben Sand, 40, author of the 2020 book “A Kids Book About White Privilege.” “By 2045 the majority of children born in the United States will be children of color,” says Sand, of Portland, Oregon, who reports receiving death threats for writing the book. “Today’s young people
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The reverend Luis Cortés jr., 62, gave the invocation prayer at Barack Obama’s 2013 Presidential Inauguration Luncheon, conferred with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about not separating migrant families at the border and sipped tea with Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace. Yet wherever Cortés goes, his heart stays in El Barrio: the streets of North Philly’s
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I was awake, curled in bed in a fetal position, about a year after my son, Khaaliq Jabbar Johnson was killed over a parking space,” says Dorothy Johnson-Speight, founder and executive director of Mothers In Charge (MIC), which assists parents of murdered children. “I had a vision where grieving mothers with bullhorns stood in a
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Since ancient greece, and maybe earlier, humans have shared stories of wounded healers—people whose own injuries seem to confer upon them the gift of relieving other people’s pain. Multimedia artist Terrence Gore, 56, of West Philadelphia seems such a person. “Doctors gave me 30 days to live at one point,” he says. “That was 15
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Covid-19 has slammed all teachers with change. Some have held classes online while others have taught in person—sometimes willingly, sometimes grudgingly, and often tired. “When this is over, we’re going to have collective PTSD,” says Gena Lopata, 48, who is comfortable teaching in person two days a week at The Crefeld School, a small private
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Sometimes it takes a village to stop a youth from having a criminal record. “Two friends, [ages]17 or 18, got into a fight over a girl,” explains the Reverend Donna L. Jones, 64, founding pastor of the Cookman Beloved Community Baptist Church in West Philadelphia. “One guy hit the other with a pistol,” says Jones,
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