While watching a presentation by city of Pasadena personnel to citizens of various districts on the local community public television channel, on MLK day, I noted that no Blacks were in the running to purchase any of the historic or many business buildings for sale in the Pasadena area. We do own a few pieces of local business property, but nothing signifi cant. I found myself asking, Why? Owning property is signifi cant. I watched another show where a local African American woman is moving to Africa to, hopefully, acquire a piece of property there. She said she wants to build her legacy there for her African American children.
I have raised the subject of owning property before. I believe we should do what at our churches -Join together to buy a piece of property such as the empty Kaiser Clinic, located at Lake and Villa. In Pasadena, the refurbishment of the old AVON building, into possibly a Home Depo, on Walnut, and the OSH building on Colorado Blvd, and other buildings going up all over Pasadena have nothing to do with us. In fact, Blacks are not even hired as builders. Of course, you don’t need to buy a known property. It just needs to be a local property. Then it can be turned into a prize. When slavery was over, even ex-slaves realized that they needed their own property. They knew this instinctively, from watching the slave owner and watching the white man making money, one way or the other, like crooked Donald Trump using other people’s labor and money without paying for it. However, we know there are legal ways of acquiring property. After watching public television, I watched the King Parade in Los Angeles. I noticed how inclusive it was. It’s another thing to fi gure out how to market things. Every community has parades where they market their police departments, their schools and fi re departments, but they don’t market their businesses. I understand that the parades are for non-profi ts, but we’ve got to fi gure a way to make it work. I was amazed to fi nd out that Hughes Aircraft and Kaiser Permanente were listed as nonprofi ts in the Parade. so why can’t our businesses and organizations, like Black Writers On Tour, Hair Salons, Restaurants, Retail Stores and social organizations create a non-profit for their business entity? The world is about to see the Trump trial for extortion and bribery. We will witness some of America’s best known lawyers tell the world that, even though Donald Trump broke the law in order to win the election for President, it’s OK. I guess it’s OK because Donald Trump is doing it, but for the rest of us it’s not OK. Jail would be waiting for us. For forty years I picked trial juries, and if a potential juror said he was not bi-partisan or didn’t need to see the evidence, as Moscow Mitch Mcconnell and Lindsey Graham have said, they could not qualify as jurors and they would be thrown out! Both Graham and Mcconnell are from the southern United States and are familiar with socalled Southern Justice. So they get it. |