Final Word

In most developed market economies the cultural industries account for 2 percent to 5 percent of gross domestic product and have generated consistent and stable growth above world average in the last decade.

The Women’s History Month that ended in March was themed “Women’s Education — Women’s Empowerment.” Women are integral to the fabric of the United States. The social, political, business and scientific contributions of minority women have both enriched our nation and challenged us to build a more perfect union. Sadly today, I find that the American Dream is often not the reality for young minority women, particularly those in underserved urban and rural communities. They are often prisoners of a failed education system, marginalized by both circumstance and expectation.

Struggle has been our lover for too long. It has become friend, temple, tomb — the one relationship that persists after all the movements, all the battles waged by Black people worldwide to get us to where we are today. It is as if struggle is our only calling, our world, our worth, our future. What we need right now is emotional justice

A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.” Ecclesiastes 10:19. King Solomon never lied. What he said thousands of years ago still applies today. We know how to party and make liquor and wine companies successful through our drinking.

“We want people to walk the picket lines free and unafraid and know that they are working for their
freedom and their liberty.”

In a speech titled “Science, Edu-cation and Democracy,” delivered at the 1913 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Atlanta and published a month later in Science magazine, J. McKeen Cattell, owner and editor of Science, declared —while arguing for educational opportunities for Blacks — that “There is not a single mulatto who has done creditable scientific work.”

I have always entertained a high regard for the gentleman from New York, because I believed him to be a useful member of the House. He is a gentleman of talent and of fine education, and I have thought heretofore that he would certainly be charitable toward a race of people who have never enjoyed the same advantages that he has.

The Oct. 18 issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy confirmed what we in the nonprofit sector already knew: The nonprofit and philanthropic sector doesn’t do a very good job at this thing called diversity.