OPPORTUNITY CAMPUS

By joining its partners to invest $100 million in an Opportunity Campus in the Parkland neighborhood, the 99-year-old nonprofit organization is planning to become a vital part of a community that has endured years of disinvestment. The combination of programs and services that will operate in Goodwill’s 120,000 square-foot lifestyle enrichment facility and Norton Healthcare’s 40,000 – 60,000 square-foot comprehensive medical center will launch a new era of hope for many of the 65,000 people who call West Louisville home.

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Jecorey Arthur
McKinsey & Company: Addressing the unprecedented behavioral-health challenges facing Generation Z

Nearly two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, Gen Zers, ranging from middle school students to early professionals, are reporting higher rates of anxiety, depression, and distress than any other age group.1 The mental-health challenges among this generation are so concerning that US surgeon general Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory on December 7, 2021, to address the “youth mental health crisis” exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.2

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Jecorey Arthur
NBC News: The ‘fake landlord’ scam destroys lives in Detroit. But culprits rarely face consequences.

In some cases, people who have lost their house to foreclosure have kept collecting rent from tenants without letting on that they’re no longer the landlord. In others, con artists have broken into vacant houses, changed the locks, listed them for sale or rent, then collected payments from victims. Some fake sellers have even filed false deeds to make fake sales look legitimate, lawyers and experts say.

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Jecorey Arthur
LOUISVILLE METRO DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

My condolences to families that have been failed by the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections. The entire agency needs to be investigated. Until then our office is about to start paying low-level bonds because no one should pay for a misdemeanor with their life.

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Jecorey Arthur
History: 8 Black Inventors Who Made Daily Life Easier

Most people have heard about famous inventions like the light bulb, the cotton gin and the iPhone. But there are countless other, often overlooked inventions that make our daily lives easier. Among the creative innovators behind these devices are African American inventors. From the traffic light to the ironing board, see a list of products that have sprung from the minds of Black inventors.

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Jecorey Arthur
Black Past: Simmons College of Kentucky

Simmons College of Kentucky, the state’s oldest African American college, was founded in 1879. The college was established by former slaves to train the sons and daughters of fellow African Americans. In August of 1865, Rev. Henry Adams led the effort to create the institution where he proposed a college be established for former enslaved people at the State Convention of Colored Baptist Churches meeting at Louisville.

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Jecorey Arthur
This American Life: Talking While Black

Think back to two summers ago, the summer of 2020, when a series of violent, highly-publicized killings of Black Americans sparked outrage and a national movement to eradicate racism and its evils. That movement gave way to a newer, reactionary one, a backlash that is playing out in schools and school board meetings across America. Host Emanuele Berry shares stories about Black people who got tangled up in this current backlash in both extreme and very personal ways.

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Jecorey Arthur
The Washington Post: In America, a child is shot every hour, and hundreds die. Here are 13 young lives lost in 2021.

The 9-year-old liked drawing animals with big sparkly eyes in her sketchbook. She wanted to be an artist and knew how to appreciate the finer things in life, like canned corn and the icing in Oreos — she never deigned to eat the chocolate cookies. Ava was opinionated and outspoken, like her father, Aaron Williams, and had his light hazel eyes.

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Jecorey Arthur
Smithsonian Magazine: Meet the Black Men Who Changed Lincoln’s Mind About Equal Rights

Lincoln’s eloquence captured the idea that America wouldn’t be a truly free country until African Americans were fully integrated into civic life. He had hinted at this idea a few months earlier at Gettysburg, saying “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” in order that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Part of that new birth meant counting African Americans among “the people.” While most white Southerners were fighting to destroy the republic, Lincoln had become convinced that African Americans would vote to uphold the principles the nation was founded on, and that Black political participation would be essential for maintaining republican government in America during Reconstruction and beyond.

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Jecorey Arthur
Brookings: The November jobs report shows Black women are leaving the labor force

Meanwhile, the return to in-person school instruction has coincided with an alarming increase in Black women exiting the labor force. Between October and November, the labor force participation rate for Black women dropped to 60.3%, effectively erasing the impressive gains reported in August. This 1.5 percentage point dip represents a weakening attachment to the workforce for Black women in recent months: 181,000 of them have exited the workforce since September, with more than half (91,000) exiting in November alone. This reversal in labor force reentry is unique to Black women, as women in other racial-ethnic groups continued to regain their footing in the workforce.

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Jecorey Arthur
CNN: Rarely-seen photos tell the story of America's Black Civil War soldiers

By the end of the war in 1865, 40,000 Black Union soldiers had been killed, of whom three-quarters had died from infection or disease. Many of their individual stories have been lost, but Willis' research uncovered moving tales of Black love, patriotism and bravery. Her recently published book, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship," shines a light on these forgotten soldiers and their families through a rich archive of rarely-seen photographs.

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Jecorey Arthur
The New York Review: Inventing the Science of Race

Every year, the academy organized an essay contest that it publicized throughout Europe. In 1739 the members announced the subject of the competition for 1741: “Quelle est la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, de la qualité de leur cheveux, et de la dégénération de l’un et de l’autre?” (“What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?”) Embedded in this question was the academy’s assumption that something had happened to “Negroes” that had caused them to degenerate, to turn black and grow unusual hair. In short, the academy wanted to know who is black, and why. It wanted to know, too, what being black signified. The winner was promised a gold medal worth three hundred livres, roughly the annual earnings of a common worker at the time.

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Jecorey Arthur
Racial Discrimination and Housing Outcomes in the United States Rental Market

We report evidence on discriminatory behavior from the largest correspondence study conducted to date in the rental housing market. Using more than 25,000 interactions with rental property managers across the 50 largest U.S. cities, the study reveals that African American and Hispanic/LatinX renters continue to face discriminatory constraints in the majority of U.S. cities although there are important regional differences. Stronger discriminatory constraints on renters of color (particularly African Americans) are also associated with higher levels of residential segregation and larger gaps in intergenerational income mobility. Using matched evidence on the actual rental outcomes at the properties in our experiment, we show that correspondence study measurements of discrimination do indeed predict actual outcomes.

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Jecorey Arthur