Sarah Vaughan's Birthday Is Today

The extraordinary jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990), known as "The Divine One," was born on this day. Vaughan, a native of Newark, New Jersey, where there is a street named for her, would have celebrated her 101st birthday.

A Hatemongering Pastor Runs For NYC Mayor

James David Manning, the pastor of the Atlah World Missionary Church in Harlem, has recently announced that he is running for mayor of New York, declaring that as mayor he would (unilaterally) eliminate local sales tax and raise the minimum wage to $27.

Over the years, the church's outdoor message board has posted numerous homophobic, racist, and false statements like the one that said, "YOU VOTED FOR OBAMA AND HE TURNED YOUR SONS GAY, TURNED HARLEM WHITE, EMPTIED CHURCHES, FILLED SHELTERS WITH WOMEN & CHILDREN."

Such wild and misleading statements have prompted others in the community to tie handwritten signs to the church's fence that said, " Hate Is Not A Community Value" and "Hate Breeds Violence," and to organize a picket line whose participants represented the city's diversity.

It's hard to see anyone taking Pastor Manning's run for mayor seriously. It's also hard to believe anyone who calls themselves a true Christian being a member of this hatemongering church.

Black Brotherly Love

"I think it is absolutely necessary that black men regroup as black men; until they can talk to each other, cry with each other, hug and kiss each other, they will never know how to do those things with me. I know whole black men exist, and I want to see and enjoy them."--Alice Walker, "What That Day Was Like for Me: The Million Man March October 16, 1995," from her book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (Random House, 1997).