Brother George Floyd’s public murder is reviving memories of “strange fruits,” as described by Nina Simone in the sixties. It feels raw and sore, specific to this moment. The scene is the latest dramatization of a 401-year-old memorialized wound inflicted over and over again on Black men and women in America. The Coronavirus exacerbated preexisting...
On Dec. 11, 2019, the Council for Black Male Success and the Cultural Wellness Center held a Manhood Rites of Passage ceremony at the Minnesota Historical Society. The men, who ranged from 11 to 27 years old, completed an 11-week cultural self-study curriculum designed by the Cultural Wellness Center. The curriculum and the Rites of...
Cultural Wellness Center staff provide parent engagement, cultural education (such as African Drum and Dance, Rites of Passage, and Sports Science), educational navigation, and Elder coaching in four schools in the St. Paul Promise Neighborhood. In late 2017, school staff talked to our navigator about a second grader at Benjamin E. Mays Elementary who had been suspended...
