Oprah's Stealth Philanthropy

Oprah's Stealth Philanthropy in Chicago

by Natalie Moore | WBEZ 91.5

Chicago and Oprah Winfrey go hand-in-hand.

She built a TV empire here, and there’s no doubt that the media mogul has been a booster for the Windy City.

Oprah lovers make the pilgrimage to her studio, contributing to tourism with dining and hotel stays along the way.

But her legacy is bigger than an economic engine to Chicago.

Oprah's philanthropic legacy in Chicago is vast, but under the radar.

There aren’t that many places or things named after Oprah in Chicago, but one of them’s going to last a long time. I’m looking for it in downtown Chicago’s Millennium Park, a showpiece on Michigan Avenue. Here it is Oprah Winfrey name in all caps on a wall. It lists the founders of this enormous park.

Oprah gave a million dollars of her own money to make this park happen, but that’s a fraction of her largesse.

The exact figures for Oprah’s philanthropic impact in Chicago are hard to pinpoint, but one person with some insight on the big picture – is former mayor Richard M. Daley.

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'Left of Black': Episode #34 featuring David J. Leonard and Natalie Y. Moore

Left of Black #34

w/ David J. Leonard and Natalie Y. Moore

May 16, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by Washington State University Professor David J. Leonard, co-editor of Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African-Americans in Contemporary Sports.  Later he is joined by Chicago Public Radio reporter Natalie Y. Moore, who is also the co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of An American Gang.

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>David J. Leonard is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.  His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press).

>Natalie Y. Moore is a reporter for Chicago Public Radio’s South Side bureau. Prior to joining the Chicago Public Radio staff in May 2007, Natalie was a city hall reporter for the Detroit News. As a freelance journalist, Natalie’s work has been published in Essence, Black Enterprise, the Chicago Reporter, Bitch, In These Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. She is co-author of the book Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation (Cleis Press, 2006) and The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of An American Gang. She is an adjunct instructor at Columbia College Chicago and is the former program chair for the Association for Women Journalists.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Muammar Qaddafi's Chicago Connection

How the feds used the Libyan dictator to bring down the infamous El Rukns gang from the city's South Side.

Muammar Qaddafi's Chicago Connection
by Natalie Y. Moore

From keeping crack cocaine off Chicago's streets in the mid-1980s to becoming the first Americans convicted of domestic terrorism, the El Rukns have had one of the most fascinating gang stories with global reach.

They sold synthetic heroin. They prayed in a mosque. They held community meetings. They got arrested for murder. In the 1970s and '80s, the El Rukns teetered among contradictions. Leader Jeff Fort, aka Chief Malik, sat on a throne at the South Side headquarters. Law enforcement and federal prosecutors zealously pursued them.

But their real legacy is a federal conviction that tied them to Muammar Qaddafi. Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. government indicted members of the El Rukns for plotting domestic terrorist acts on behalf of Libya for $2.5 million.

Lance Williams and I explore the domestic terrorism trial in our new book, The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang. Our purpose is to tell a story that looks at the social and political underpinnings of the notorious street organization.

Read the Full Essay the theRoot.com

New Book Profiles the Black P. Stones Gang in Chicago

from WBEZ

New book profiles the Black P. Stones gang in Chicago

In the 1960s the Blackstone Rangers—later known as the Almighty Black P Stone Nation—dominated Chicago’s South Side. The street gang was something of a paradox - a mix of both legal and illegal activity. They managed to attract federal funding for social work but they also engaged in shakedowns and other acts of violence. These two sides of the gang would eventually come into conflict and send Black Stone leader Jeff Fort to his first of many prison stays. Fort remains in prison today but the legend and legacy of his gang continue.

The new book The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang is an effort to delve into that legacy. Eight Forty-Eight's Alison Cuddy sat down with its co-authors, gang expert Lance Williams and WBEZ's South Side reporter Natalie Moore.

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Libyan women ground their artwork in tradition

The Libyan women also show the darker side of society.

Libyan Women Ground Their Artwork in Tradition
by Natalie Moore

To many in the Western world, Arab women are mysterious, repressed and shrouded in long black robes. And many Libyans are aware of that sweeping stereotype. But Libyan women are active in politics, academia and government. They also have a presence in the arts.

Listen to the Full Story HERE

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As the reporter for Chicago Public Radio’s bureau in Englewood, a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Natalie Moore covers news and issues in that community and surrounding areas.

Teens Learn Sexual Violence Prevention Via Art Therapy

from WBEZ--Chicago Public Radio

Teens Learn Sexual Violence Prevention Via Art Therapy
Produced by Natalie Y. Moore

This summer a group of teenage girls on Chicago’s West Side is learning about sexual violence prevention while they draw. The idea is to get the girls talking about and confronting sexual violence through yoga, dance and painting.

In a classroom at North Lawndale College Prep High School, 15 girls mix paint for their latest art project.

Each teen has a pair of white canvas gym shoes in front of her - literally a blank canvas. One of their instructors explains:

ambi: How can you use dress for communication. We’re using shoes. What are some of the things we talked about?

Hope, respect, the girls say. The program is called Girl/Friends and it’s designed to shore up hope and respect in these students and help them pass the message on to other girls.

There are many reasons girls can become victims of sexual assault, and it cuts across racial and class lines. Nationally, one in four girls is sexually abused before the age of 18.

But Chicago police statistics put North Lawndale eighth in the city for criminal sexual assaults in the past year. Their neighborhood faces a lot of factors that contribute: lack of parenting skills, domestic violence and the stresses of unemployment.

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Natalie Y. Moore on Race & Suicide

From The Root

Who Was Leanita McClain?
by Natalie Y. Moore

Why an old Chicago story of race, reporting and suicide remains important today.

Years ago, I sat in my public-policy journalism class when a professor circulated a 25-year-old essay that ran in the Washington Post. None of my mostly white peers could read beyond the provocative headline: “How Chicago Taught Me to Hate Whites.”

Only I, the lone black student in the classroom at Northwestern in the late 1990s, defended the writer, Chicago journalist Leanita McClain, who had also graduated from our program. A racist, my classmates called her. She’s so angry, they remarked as they screwed their faces.

McClain, then an editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune, was describing her reactions to the 1983 mayoral race in which Harold Washington emerged as Chicago’s first black mayor. In response to Washington’s victory—just as in the more recent case of a Chicago politician elected “the first”—euphoria had swept over the city as it made history. Initially.

It wasn’t long, though, before embittered white Chicagoans started a racial backlash. In the Washington Post essay, McClain voiced her reaction to the swift and sudden fall from kumbaya: “So many whites unconsciously had never considered that blacks could do much of anything, least of all get a black candidate this close to being mayor of Chicago,” she wrote. “My colleagues looked up and realized, perhaps for the first time, that I was one of ‘them.’ I was suddenly threatening.”

She continued: “Bitter am I? That is mild. This affair has cemented my journalist’s acquired cynicism, robbing me of most of my innate black hope for true integration. It has made me sparkle as I reveled in the comradeship of blackness. It has banished me to nightmarish bouts of sullenness.”

The sullenness and cynicism that McClain expressed were apparently unshakeable. She killed herself in May 1984, less than a year after the controversial Post essay was published. She was 32 years old.

Twenty five years later, Chicago is still a place of de facto segregation, despite the sea of change represented by the election of Barack Obama. I am the same age that McClain was when she wrote that essay working as a black journalist in Chicago. Thankfully, I haven’t experienced the kind of backlash she described. But in many ways, the segregated picture she painted isn’t much different today.

Read the Full Essay HERE

Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City

The pre-ordained rise and expected fall of America's hip-hop mayor.

Living Down to Expectations
By Natalie Y. Moore | TheRoot.com

Politicians are bound to have tension with the media performing a watchdog role. But many black politicians don't seem to understand that part of their job is media relations. After being elected to positions of power, black politicians often reflexively assume a beleaguered stance, which is understandable, given the historical representations of blacks in the media. But many of them seem to forget that the whole point of electing black leaders is for them not to be helpless actors, but to wield power and influence, yes, even with the media.

Read the Full Essay @