Unleashing Our Power

Georgians get a lift from the Congressional Black Caucus’s Annual Legislative Conference

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“Unleashing Our Power”

BY RONDA RACHA PENRICE
Contributing Writer

From September 26 until September 29, Black Georgians and other African Americans throughout the nation took advantage of the 37th Annual Legislative Conference (ALC), sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, which allows people from all walks of life to interact with Congress’s African-American members.
“Unleashing Our Power” served as the 2007 theme and that took on several forms. Numerous panels explored how being knowledgeable about African-American culture and history could alter many of the negative trends in the black community but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Few subjects were left untouched – HIV/AIDS, the prison complex, hip-hop, inadequate healthcare, home ownership, voting rights – you name it, it was represented. Congressman Hank Johnson, most noted for defeating Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, generated an overflow crowd, which included many Morehouse graduates, for his Saturday morning session on “Making Education a Priority Again Among Black Males.”
He was not the only one with education on his mind. Spelman’s President Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum was among the many noted educational leaders attending the conference. “I haven’t been to as many sessions as I would like because one of the benefits of being here is to take advantage to meet with agencies and talk about generating resources for your institution so I’ve been doing a lot of that, too,” Dr. Tatum shared in a hallway on Friday, as she scurried along to her next engagement. She wasn’t alone in finding an abundance of resources available to her. Atlanta-based entrepreneur Adiclere Hunter cosigned Tatum’s sentiments.
Hunter, who also attended the conference to support her sister, Eriade Hunter, who serves as the press secretary for Maryland Congressman Albert Russell Wynn, found the conference especially helpful to her emerging business, Suspension Designs, which specializes in tables that suspend from the ceiling.
“It was just really helpful,” Hunter said of the sessions geared towards minority- and female-owned businesses, “because a lot of times if you try to get that information on your own or on the phone or something like that, you don’t get it. You were able to go directly to the source so that’s what I thought was really good. They were answering the questions before we even had them because they knew that these were the questions that we had.”
WAOK’s Rob Wilson, host of Solutions and Remedies, raised questions ripped straight from the financial pages.
“I had a chance to sit in on the foreclosure issue with Maxine Waters,” Wilson explained from the ALC’s exhibit floor on Saturday. “I think the policymakers realize that they made a lot of mistakes when they allowed sub-prime lending to have a day in our community. Even though credit was made available to people who were not typically getting credit, I think they finally realize that they could have done it a different way. They authorized a process, sub-prime lending, [and allowed] them to do mortgages knowing they would use predatory products and that these products are predatory by nature. In the Georgia market alone, we probably got three or four hundred thousand homes that are going to be lost to foreclosure.”
Wilson did more than raise his voice; he gathered information that he will share with his listeners in Atlanta and nationwide.
The ALC was not just panels; there were plenty of parties with a purpose. Although Barack Obama dominated much of that activity, zipping from event to event to further bolster his strong campaign efforts, one of the most anticipated gatherings of the conference was Coca-Cola’s annual reception honoring Georgia’s black congressional delegates. Held on Saturday, September 29 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (known simply as the Women’s Museum), the invitation-only affair saluted Representatives John Lewis, Sanford Bishop, David Scott and Hank Johnson. Congressman Lewis was particularly inspirational in his remarks, reminding the crowd that “somebody prayed for me; somebody prayed for us to be where we are today.”
When Congressman Johnson took the microphone, he assured his D.C. home crowd that he had not forgotten that he was a D.C. native and realized the irony of having to come to Georgia to win a voice in the very Congress that served as his backyard; he vowed that he would fight to win D.C. its rightful voice.
Congressman David Scott capsulated the weekend best with his remarks. “We have to go back and bring our people with us,” he told the crowd, “and that’s the essence of the Congressional Black Caucus Weekend.”