The FCPA are the guidelines developed by Congress to enable US corporations to follow compliance measures thereby preventing corruption to take place when doing business.  In Africa, the importance of good governance is an imperative factor for building effective government institutions, and therefore, preventing American corporations from engaging in corrupt practices is necessary.

This week’s Webinar will help those who wish to build good governance measures in Africa, while promoting ethical business practices and supporting government institutions that fight corruption. Areas of focus will include governance, anti-corruption, and how the Global Sullivan Principles embody the message and functionality of FCPA.

Here is some pertinent background on the topic of Bribery and Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa.

System Requirements

PC-based attendees

Required: Windows 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Macintosh-based attendees

Required: Mac OS X 10.5 or newer

RESERVE YOUR WEBINAR SEAT NOW!

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/376128694

The Leon. H. Sullivan Foundation recognizes this as an empowerment strategy, and through the GOTTA MISSION – the latest in a series of groundbreaking Sullivan self-help initiatives – endeavors to leverage the incomprehensible power of teamwork, cooperation, and energy will focus on positive change.

GOTTA MISSION promotes teamwork and a sense of community trust and reliance on others among children in sub-Saharan Africa through team sports and recreation. By creating opportunities for children to excel within a team paradigm, we will promote personal responsibility, discipline, trust, and reliance on others – the powerful components of a winning team. Ultimately, our mission is to instill confidence at a young age while providing a safe and constructive outlet.

Childhood on the Continent if often no childhood at all.

Less than one third of the children in Africa have schools to attend, and of that small percentage with the opportunity for education, less than one half are able to attend beyond primary school. Millions of children are orphaned by war, disease, or forced relocation of their mothers, fathers, or both in order to

find employment and earn a living. The future of Africa depends on her sons and daughters; their success, indeed, our success as a globalized society, depends in large part on leaders who can compromise when necessary, take the lead when necessary, and stand down when necessary. In short, well-adjusted adults are team players.

We believe that the semblance of a childhood can be created through recreational play and through reinforcing positive interactions with others. Our goal is to encourage individual responsibility and the benefits of cooperation through structured team sports.

We present you with an opportunity to give a child happy memories and a hopeful future.        Without the necessary equipment, the next Dikembe Mutombo or Freddy Adu will never have the chance to explore their tremendous gift and talent. We aim to provide that equipment and give these children that opportunity.

Our focus is not to build world-class athletes, our hope is that we can enhance the life of a child and give then the opportunity to learn to share laughter, teamwork, victory, and defeat among their peers. Afterall, why are these children, so much like your own children, denied the joy of the mundane, and the exhilaration of the ordinary?

We present you with the opportunity to give a child the chance to emulate their heroes – the role models who occupy the rarified air of a myth.

We present you with the opportunity to give a child the chance to escape the debilitating cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

We present you with the opportunity to give a child a childhood – laughter and all.

The current unrest in Northern Nigeria has started moving South, and the citizens of Abuja (capitol) and Lagos (financial capitol) are taking note.  The violence is spreading, and Boko Haram must be acknowledged and understood, along with the media’s impact on increasingly violent developments.

Please join us for this very timely discussion.

Featuring panelist: Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. (President & CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus)

Friday, January 27, 2012

10am – 1:00 PM EST

System Requirements

PC-based attendees

Required: Windows 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Macintosh-based attendees

Required: Mac OS X 10.5 or newer

RESERVE YOUR WEBINAR SEAT NOW!

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/443160846

Watch exclusive video footage from “Dark Forest Black Fly,” which documents the elimination of river blindness from Uganda. The Carter Center is a leader in the fight against this debilitating parasitic infection—one of the major causes of preventable blindness in the world. Following the brief video, a panel will discuss the challenges of eliminating the disease worldwide and their experiences making the film.

Panelists will include: Gary Strieker, executive director for Cielo Productions, Inc., and Carter Center staff featured in the film – River Blindness Program Director Dr. Frank Richards, and Carter Center Epidemiologist Dr. Moses Katabarwa. Reserve free online tickets now >

Click here for more information.

The conference will be held for three weeks and conclude on Sunday, February 12.

Today was the first day of the 18th African Union Summit being held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The theme is “Boosting Intra-African Trade” and the agenda will cover multilateral cooperation, refugees, returnees and displaced peoples as well as economy, trade, and emergency assistance for drought and famine victims. The summit marks the 23rd ordinary session of the permanent representatives and the 20th session of the executive council.

Click here to read the first press release from the summit.

– Martin Luther King

As we look back on those famous words of Dr. King, we remember the struggles that he and Reverend Sullivan endured for all of us. As 2nd Generation Civil Rights Activists, we thank our fathers for their patience and perseverance. They have changed the course of history and continue to inspire us daily.

Please enjoy and meditate on the complete text of Dr. King’s speech at the March on Washington in 1963.

I Have a Dream

by Martin Luther King Jr.

August 28, 1963

Washington, D.C.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

As I anxiously await the birth of my first grandchild, I got to thinking about the women in my bloodline… about the strength of these women who remain anonymous and unsung.

For more than 400 years, women of color were made to bear children, through love and through coercion, as property – as chattel. The tiny precious offspring of slaves were conceived to be chattel, brought up to be property, trained as working slaves – the progeny of so many magnificent cultures of pride and honor, reduced to a race of bred minions.

Slave women were “mated” much like the process of animal husbandry in working farms. Slaves were bred to create a stronger, bigger race of humans that could work that much harder and that much longer. On many slave-driven properties, the strongest men were isolated with strong women to bear strong offspring.

African women with extraordinary intelligence were isolated and made to breed with African males of intelligence to bear children with intelligence to fulfill the “in-home” needs of the working plantation: cooking, serving, cleaning, and working as secret mistresses and the like. Slave women whose features were pleasing to the Master, just as the slave men whose features pleased the mistresses, were reserved for the provision of pleasure, often resulting in the absurd predicament of the ruling class having “slaves in the family”…

Sex was for profit, pleasure, as well as procreation. Love? Perhaps, sometimes… Often, love was just a distraction to be ignored. After all, love would cost too much.

Slaveholders were expected to appropriate and exploit the reproductive lives of enslaved women. Control of one’s body was not a fundamental right of a slave. Emboldened by law and sanctioned by their customs, slave owners were entitled to do with human chattels as they wished, slave owners felt entitled to intervene in even the most intimate of matters. For example, women’s childbearing capacity became a commodity that could be traded on the open market. During the antebellum era the expectation increased among members of the owning class that enslaved women would contribute to the economic success of the plantation not only through productive labor but also through procreation.

As of 1808, when Congress ended the nation’s participation in the international slave trade, the only practical way to increase the number of slave laborers was through new births. The fact is that if enslaved mothers did not bear sufficient numbers of children to take the place of aged and dying workers, the South would not be able to continue as a slave society.

Women entering their childbearing years who had already proven their fertility through the birth of a living baby, sold easily and for a high price. The testimony of a former slave named Boston Blackwell, who witnessed the sale of two women in Memphis, Tennessee, reported that, “a girl of fifteen who had no children sold for $800, but a breeding woman sold for $1,500.”

The children of slaves, yet unborn, were so important to the continuation of slavery that members of the South’s ruling class willed their heirs the unborn children of slaves as well as living slaves…

A woman’s uterus was partitioned, as fertile property.

When it came time to purchasing slaves, slave owners calculated their buying to ensure that a plantation owner had a sufficient number of women “of breeding age” and that each woman had a suitable sexual partner at hand. After purchasing “Fanny” from Virginia and “Jim” from Louisiana, a master routinely arranged for them to live together. Slave men were often purchased as a “stud” for an enslaved woman, like cattle and other livestock.

Rewards for motherhood followed the birth of children. These included: “extra clothing”; exemption from harsh treatment; even freedom. One example, Lula Cottonham Walker of Alabama who worked very hard as a slave, gave birth to eight children, and was never beaten. Similarly, if a master had a prized pig that gave birth to a litter of piglets each year, he would not take a stick and beat it. It was the same with prized breeding slaves. The piglets, like the slaves, were sold on the open market or were put immediately to work when strong enough. No bonding permitted, just like the piglet.

Lest we forget the recurring rapes that occurred under cover of night when our women were taken by force and impregnated by accident – bearing children who bore uncanny resemblance to the Master; a slave child, nevertheless. The progeny of these illicit unions are self-evident when you consider the vast range of skin color among the African-American race.

It follows, then, that as women were forced to bear children for any number of reasons, their babies were not always loved or cherished. The by-product of a work related consequence, a ramification of their employment, a reminder of many things to many people – the Mistress was reminded of her husband’s concubines, the spouse of the slave-mother, if she has one, is reminded of his woman’s being taken sexually by another man, and so on down the line. These bastard children of slavery wore the skin of the tragic mulatto, and carried the heart of generations of sexual and societal dysfunction.

And when we wonder why our young mothers, and often not so young mothers are not “taking care of” their children, perhaps the answer lies in our history of arrested motherhood. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that as slaves, mothers bore children in the morning and went back to the field to work by the afternoon. Slave mothers were not given the luxury of bonding with their precious newborns by nursing them at their breasts, unable to naturally empty their lactating breasts of the nutrients that filled them, purposed for their babies.

In most of the larger working plantations there was a lactating woman whose sole job was to nurse the newborns, for years and years she would nurse the babies of others. New mothers were not able to tend to their children, or even raise their children — this was also the job of the women too old to be productive in the fields. Sadly, before the age of four, most children were sold by their owners to other plantations; often never reunited with their birth parents, often never even knowing their given name or identity.

Consider the pain of a mother who has absolutely no knowledge of whether her child is alive or dead, free or enslaved, happy or sad, sick or well. This reality often led mothers to choose not to bond emotionally with their offspring. Emotion equaled pain.

Denied the honor of mothering their children, and denied the honor of being mothered by their mothers, the concept of motherly love became ambiguous, painful, and a heart-wrenching proposition. The concept of parenthood became as foreign to the slave as the shores upon which they landed. In both instances, forced; in both instances, deeply traumatic.

Parenting, therefore, was a function of the entire village. This might be why the village and neighborhood mentality is so strong within the black community. It might also account for the prevalence of gangs in African American blighted areas. Our history disallowed motherhood, as well as fatherhood. In truth, our history disallowed the concept of family as linked by blood. If you trace this dynamic into the 20th century and the welfare state, the fact that government assistance was disallowed for two parent families contributed to the breakdown of the black family. Two parent families were punished as ineligible to receive aid.

We are a vast Diaspora of human beings programmed by habit and culture. We re-circulate our stories from generation to generation. So when we wonder why our precious African American girls are having sex as young as 11 and 12 and bearing children while still children themselves, perhaps we should consider whether this conduct is a remnant of our unfortunate history since America landed upon our people. A remnant of the dirty little secret that seeps out bit by bit until it cannot be hidden or intellectualized as the “hypersexual behavior of black folks” any longer.

For those mothers and grandmothers, let this be the year when our children become the most important people in our lives. Let us begin to reverse the trend towards remote parenting and let us become intensely engaged in their every single day. I will take the first step today in my home with my children; I hope you join me.

I recognize with the gift of every new morning, that each day God gives me is a gift and that I stand on the shoulders of phenomenal men and women who over the past generations each contributed a piece of themselves to the woman I am today. I recognize that their struggles and their triumphs have seasoned my soul; and as a parent, and now soon a grandparent, they will also season the souls of my babies, and their babies, and theirs.

As a tribute to my foremothers’ turbulent and powerful life journeys, it is only right and honorable that I recognize their unsung legacies. The spirits of these women bring me to my knees in reverential respect, knowing that they endured their passages not only to ensure that I could eventually be born to my mother, but to ensure that I could now experience the overwhelming joy and triumph that abides with me today as I anticipate the birth of the first member of yet another generation of Us.