NEWS
Lionel Foster | January 24, 2013
At first glance, Dayvon Love is easy to overlook. At 5 foot 9, he has average height and a slightly larger than average build. As he carefully takes in everything and everyone in a room, he might initially seem painfully shy. So when he finally speaks, his observations can hit you like a punch you had no idea was coming. He says that in his experience as a teacher, most Baltimore City Public Schools students think of your average teacher as "someone who's not cool or smart enough to do anything else.
NEWS
By Jill Rosen and The Baltimore Sun | May 20, 2012
Trayvon Martin's mother Sybrina Fulton on Sunday morning emotionally addressed Baltimore's Empowerment Temple, the church of the Rev. Jamal Bryant who has been at her side as national outcry has built over her son's death. "It's so easy for me to cry right now but I can't because I have work to do," she told the congregation. "I was forced into this position, but I believe God is using me. " Martin, 17, was shot to death in February in Sanford, Fla., returning home after a trip to get snacks at a 7-Eleven.
BUSINESS
By Jill Rosen, The Baltimore Sun | May 20, 2012
As Trayvon Martin's mother stood at the altar of Baltimore's Empowerment Temple on Sunday, the Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant asked for anyone whose child had also been the victim of "senseless violence" to come forward. At least a dozen women and men assembled at Sybrina Fulton's feet before she stepped down to grab one of them. She squeezed the woman, patted her back and whispered in her ear. Then Fulton moved down the line, tightly embracing each mother, grandmother and father, each of them too familiar with loss, until she'd touched them all. Congregants erupted into deafening applause and brushed away tears.
NEWS
By Rachel Marsden | January 12, 2012
Two items have recently burst onto the media scene: a movie called "The Iron Lady" about one of the greatest women in history - former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - and a growing European recall of breast implants in danger of exploding. I wonder what the former would say about the latter. Did it ever cross Ms. Thatcher's mind that women's lives could be meaningfully enhanced by surgically strapping gel packs to their chests? How did women get from Margaret Thatcher to this?
HEALTH
By Andrea K. Walker, The Baltimore Sun | January 11, 2012
It all started with a little bit of good-natured trash talk between the pastors of two of Baltimore's most prominent African-American churches. The Rev. Jamal Bryant of Empowerment Temple "fell off the wagon" and confesses he wasn't exercising as much as he should. His trainer used that to pump up another client, the Rev. Frank M. Reid III of Bethel AME Church, telling him he was in better shape than the much younger Bryant. Reid, feeling a little confident, and Bryant, his ego bruised just a bit, then threw out a fitness challenge to one another: Your church against mine.
NEWS
By Janene Holzberg, Special to The Baltimore Sun | October 23, 2011
When Jennifer Ransaw Smith was single, she "hopped around" from one advertising firm to another in Los Angeles and New York, doing what all high-powered ad reps do to notch the resume-boosting experience that makes them sought-after hires. "The whole thing [about the industry] is building your book," so the more upwardly mobile career moves, the better, she said. Yet years later, her life hadn't exactly panned out the way she'd planned. Happily married with two kids and living in Columbia, she was caught off-guard by how miserable she was at work after finally landing the dream job she'd been chasing from place to place all those years.