This excerpt is from a St. Louis Post Dispatch article:
“When Superintendent Kelvin Adams last winter proposed closing Cleveland NJROTC High School — a magnet school with a Navy Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps — parents and students spoke for hours in opposition at public forums. When the he proposed phasing out Beaumont in 2011, no one stepped forward to save it. The school hasn’t accepted a freshman class since.”
Note: red text is my emphasis
Henrietta Lacks and her family may finally be getting acknowledgement of her medical legacy but it’s not even close to real justice–there’s still no financial compensation. Read it here.
I could’ve sworn that I wrote a full commentary about Sister Henrietta after I read the compelling book about her story. I only found a reference to her in my book, The Best of ‘The Way I See It‘. It was a postscript to 2010 article on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
Postscript: In 2010, author Rebecca Skloot further validated the continuum of medical exploitation with her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Cancer cells were taken from Lacks’ body without her knowledge or permission before she died in 1951. Because the rare and inexplicable cells were self-perpetrating, the HeLa cell line became a golden goose of the research industry. To date, the Lacks family has not been compensated for the use of the cell line. The family’s civil suit against Johns Hopkins Hospital to get justice was unsuccessful.
News of the Black Rep’s eviction from Grandel Theater traveled fast. The Black Rep has known for months that Grand Center was interested in selling the building, but the actual git-yo-stuff-out-in-two-weeks-or-else notice came as a real shocker. Tenants received the notice by email.
As usual, white power brokers missed the opportunity to change the racist narrative so pervasive in St . Louis. Instead of a headline that reads “Black Rep evicted from mainly white Grand Center,” it could have read “City leaders rally to find permanent home for premier read more…
