Black Lives Matter in partnership with J. Walter Thompson New York has created BackingBlackBusiness.com, a web tool allowing people to easily discover Black owned small businesses throughout the U.S. Currently in Beta with over 300 Black-owned businesses, the site aims to reframe the importance and the role of Black-owned small businesses for the Black community. It also hopes to draw attention to the large and often underestimated racial disparities in business ownership and performance. The Google map based tool gives people the opportunity to use their dollars to support local Black-owned businesses in order to have a national impact. The site aspires to become the biggest and most easily accessible Black businesses database in the country. The goal is to have a good representation of Black-owned businesses in all states on the site by the end of 2017. The site allows Black owners to add themselves to the map, making data collection easier. It will be supported by a social and influencer campaign. Brent Choi, chief creative officer, J. Walter Thompson New York, said: “Our hope is to reduce the racial disparity that exists in economic well-being through the promotion of Black business ownership”….
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More