Page 23 - Florida Sentinel 9-14-18

HBCU News
White Man Pulls Gun On Four FAMU Students At Apartment Building Near Campus
Hurricane Florence Could Hit With Punch Not Seen In More Than 60 Years
A white man pulled a gun on four FAMU students last Saturday in an incident de- picted in a now-viral social media video, Buzzfeed News is reporting.
The FAMU juniors were entering the Stadium Centre complex, where a friend lives, when the man pulled out a firearm.
The man claimed he was a resident.
One of the four students, Isaiah Butterfield, filmed the incident with his phone and posted it to Twitter, gen- erating at least thousands retweets. The students were not injured.
In the video, a white man wearing a baseball cap is seen approaching the students and identifying himself as a build- ing resident. He is seen pulling a gun on them in an apparent
National
Don Crandall blocked four FAMU students from getting on an elevator, then drew a gun on them.
effort to block them from boarding an elevator. Complex residents are mostly off-cam- pus students in Tallahassee, where FAMU is located.
Barred Entry Butterfield offered de-
tails of the incident to
BuzzFeed News explaining the incident exploded as he and friends Stephen Brooks, Joshua Cosby and Fitzroy Rhoden waited at the building’s garage entrance. Their mutual friend, Zavian Flowers, had just moved to Stadium Centre and was host- ing a party, Butterfield told the news organization.
While they waited for Flowers to let them into the building, the man entered the building through the door.
“Then he turned and he said, ‘You aren’t getting in here if you don’t have a key,’ “But- terfield told BuzzFeed News.
The student continued, “We were shook because we hadn’t said anything to him. We were just standing there and then he closed the door and locked it.”
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The last time the midsection of the East Coast stared down a hurricane like this, Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House and Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were newlyweds.
Hurricane Florence
could inflict the hardest hur- ricane punch North Carolina has seen in more than 60 years, with rain and wind of more than 130 mph (209 kph).
North Carolina has been hit by only one other Cate- gory 4 storm since reliable record keeping began in the 1850s. That was Hurricane Hazel in 1954. Hurricane Hugo made landfall in South Carolina as a Category 4 hurricane in 1989.
In comparison, Florida, which is closer to the equator and in line with the part of the Atlantic where hurri- canes are born, off the African coast, has had at least five hurricanes in the past century of Category 4 or greater, including Hurri- cane Andrew in 1992.
Hurricane Hazel’s
winds were clocked at 150 mph at the North Carolina coast and kept roaring in- land. They were only slightly diminished by the time the storm reached Raleigh, 150 miles inland. Nineteen peo- ple died in North Carolina. The storm destroyed an esti- mated 15,000 buildings.
“Hurricane Hazel
stands as a benchmark storm in North Carolina’s history,” said Jay Barnes, author of books on the hurricane his- tories of both North Carolina and Florida. “We had a tremendous amount of de- struction all across the state.”
Twelve hours after its landfall, Hurricane Hazel was in Buffalo, New York, and had ripped through seven states with winds still swirling at 100 mph or more.
Few people have experi- enced the ferocity of a storm
like Hurricane Hazel, which also was blamed for at least 60 deaths in Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York State.
Jerry Helms, 86, was on his honeymoon on a bar- rier island off the North Car- olina coast when Hurricane Hazel hit on the evening of Oct. 14, 1954. He and his new bride had been to a roller skating rink and missed the evacuation warnings from police officers who went door to door.
Hurricane Hazel oblit- erated all but five of 357 buildings in the beach com- munity now known as Oak Island. The Helmses barely survived.
As the storm crashed ashore, they abandoned their mobile home for a two-story frame house. Before long, it was collapsing under the waves and “the house was falling in, and all the furni- ture was falling out through the floor,” Helms recalled.
He thought the roof of a neighboring cinderblock house might be safer, but soon a big wave went over that house. When the wave went out, the house was gone, Helms said. “There was another house — a wooden house that was coming down the road more or less — and it had some guy in that thing and he’s holler- ing for help,” he said.
Helms pushed a mat- tress through the top-floor window, and they hung on as it bobbed in the raging water.
What lessons is he apply- ing now that a similarly pow- erful hurricane is coming?
“I didn’t feel like it was going to be bad enough to leave,” Helms said. “I don’t know. I just felt better about staying here than I did leav- ing.”
He doesn’t have a safer destination in mind, and having recently broken ribs in a fall, Helms fears getting stuck as thousands abandon the coast.
Teacher No Longer Employed After Probe Into Racially Charged Post About Nike Ad
National
Valerie Scogin, a ninth- grade math teacher at Slidell High School who drew a tor- rent of criticism following a racially charged Facebook post, is no longer an employee of the St. Tammany Parish School System.
Scogin, a 2003 graduate of Slidell High who has worked at the school her en- tire teaching career, drew fire when she responded to a Face- book posting by a Slidell High graduate concerning the con- troversial Nike ad featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who re- fused to stand during per- formances of the National Anthem.
Scogin wrote the message in the comment stream of a Slidell High graduate’s post on Sept. 5, two days after Nike unveiled its “Dream Crazy” campaign featuring the for- mer NFL quarterback who gained notoriety for leading protests against racial in- equality by kneeling during the National Anthem prior to games.
In the Facebook post, which has been widely circu- lated on social media, Scogin starts by writing “They don’t have to live in that country. They could go back. But it was their own people selling them into slavery to begin with and tearing (treating) them even worse in those countries of origin.
“Want not to be stereo-
VALERIE SCOGIN
typed, tell people of that color to quit acting like animals and perpetuating the stereotype. Many are average people; the few ruin it.”
The ad featured a picture of an angry man making an obscene gesture with the words “If you’re upset about Nike choosing Kaepernick for the Just Do It Campaign, ‘Just Ignore It’ like you do po- lice brutality and racial injus- tice.”
Kaepernick is African- American.
Skylar Broussard, a Loyola University student who graduated from Slidell High in 2017, said she was glad that Scogin is no longer working in the school system.
“I think she got what she deserved,” Broussard said. While she said that Scogin was a good teacher who did a lot for her students, she does- n’t think that someone who engaged in what she described as “hate speech” should be working with children or members of minority groups.
“I still think she should be
gone,” Broussard said. “It shows her true colors and true intentions and feelings.”
The teacher later posted an apology on Facebook, saying the original comment may have been hurtful and saying she was reacting to another Facebook post out of frustra- tion. “I made some remarks that were against my better judgement (sic) and sensibili- ties. I now wish I hadn’t. Any- one who has known me for any time should know that the last thing I want to do is to hurt anyone. I apologize for what I said and sincerely wish to avoid this in the future.”
In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, a school system spokeswoman said the district had launched a full in- vestigation into the incident and the teacher involved was allowed due process.
“This process has been completed, and the teacher in question is no longer an em- ployee of our School System,” the statement read. “This inci- dent does not reflect our dis- trict’s values, mission and vision, and we remain com- mitted to providing a school culture that is inclusive and meets the needs of all our stu- dents, employees and commu- nity.”
The statement does not say if the teacher was fired or re- signed. The spokeswoman said she could not comment because it is a personnel mat- ter.
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