Douglas Community Center: Its History and Development and the Place of Its Program in the Community

Community Centers, Douglas Center, Recreation

Thesis in Social Work with a history on the background of the Douglas Center and an overview of its programs, organization and finances. Includes a chronology of the Douglas Center as appendix.

Alice Elizabeth Andrews

University of Illinois Library

Unpublished thesis

1945

News Gazette August 15-17 2010

C-U Days,

Includes clippings on: Champaign-Urbana Days Celebration, National Council of African-American Men's celebration featuring Ronald Burris, and Rookie Cooks program at Douglas Branch Library.

News-Gazette

15-17 August 2010

News-Gazette, August 13 and 14 2010

Public Housing, Youth Issues

Includes clippings on the expansion of the Don Moyer Boys and Girls Program into a local church and the separation of its high school and younger youth programs; second article on the Champaign County Public Housing and its proposal to revamp and re-build the Dunbar Court housing

News-Gazette

14 August 2010

Douglas Center folder

N Search of Hip Hop Express Blog

Hip Hop, Public Engagement

Blog of Summer 2010 Hip Hop Express Project

Thursday, July 22, 2010
Champaign-Urbana Youth Discuss Needs on Xpress
video

One of the exciting things about N Search of Hip Hop Xpress is the engagement with young people of Hip Hop Generations. Part of this project was to get young people more involved in community development and sustainability initiatives. Here, we engaged them while they were putting together a computer workstation for the trailer. During the activity, they shared their thoughts about how to get young people engaged in the community.
Posted by Dr. William M. Patterson at 6:57 PM 0 comments
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Saturday, July 17, 2010
Hip Hop Xpress Rocked the Eagles Nest in East St. Louis
N Search of Hip Hop Xpress rolled out of Champaign-Urbana today headed to East St. Louis, Illinois. The focus of the trip was to support a celebratory event at The Joseph Center for veterans that the Eagles Nest was hosting. The Eagles Nest is a not for profit 501 c 3 organization dedicated to serving the developmental needs of homeless veterans. The entire trip was exciting because it was the first time that N Search of Hip Hop Xpress hit the highway. The response was phenomenal. I'm surprised we didn't cause an accident because so many people traveling on the highway were in awe of the trailer, passengers as well as drivers. Eventually, we whipped out our Flip Video camera to capture the moments.

When we arrived, it felt like it was 100 degrees. I used an MP3 device to get the event going while we set up the trailer. The set up takes close to an hour if we want to showcase the technology on the trailer. All of the technology was a hit, however, there was particular interest in the IPAD as well as the archiving turntable. One gentleman went home and brought back a collection of 45 records. He indicated that he had a recording of James Brown when he was nineteen years old that he wanted to share with us.

Once Ms. Watts, the coordinator of the event, learned the full capacity of the trailer. She expressed a desire for us to assist them in capturing the oral histories of the veterans at the center. Their end goal is to contribute the documents to the Library of Congress. This is the exact purpose that N Search was created for - to provide a means for capturing histories while providing a learning opportunity for young people of Hip Hop generations to capture those stories. video

As intended, Hip Hop Xpress served as an authenticating agent for us to capture great stories today because there was an overwhelming response from the veterans and the coordinators of the event. After we packed up and started heading back home, I started thinking about the various outcomes that could emerge from the recording project, and one of the most critical aspects of N Search of Hip Hop Xpress is providing the foundation for inter-generational learning to occur between Hip Hop, Black Power, and Civil Rights generations. To help accomplish that task I got on the phone and called one of my students involved in the Youth Media Workshop, Jay Walker. Jay Walker is one of the students that produced the inter-generational documentary, "And the Beat Goes On: Capturing the spirit in the legacy of the Douglass Center Drum Corps." Jay will be instrumental in capturing the stories in East St. Louis, but also providing an example on how Hip Hop generationers in East St. Louis can contribute to the process for developing and sustaining their community.

When I arrive back on campus I will be reaching out to the Graduate School of Library Information Sciences, Community Informatics, Youth Media Workshop, and others involved in ESLARP to facilitate the opportunity to capture the oral histories of the homeless veterans that reside at the Joseph Center in East St. Louis, IL. Capturing the stories of our homeless veterans as well as exposing young people to the life stories of men who have served our country is a great example of how Illinois is developing new and innovative methods for inter-generational community redevelopment and sustainability. More soon...
Posted by Dr. William M. Patterson at 9:15 PM 0 comments
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Friday, July 16, 2010
THE PURPOSE OF N SEARCH OF HIP HOP XPRESS


The idea behind N Search of Hip Hop Xpress is steeped in the civic engagement scholarship of Tuskegee Institute. Booker T. Washington, President of Tuskegee in the early 1900's, believed that the Institute had the ability to improve the life experience of sharecroppers if they had an opportunity to receive an education. President Washington mandated that Tuskegee Professor, George Washington Carver, Jr., an accomplished agricultural scientist, create a method to extend the knowledge and services of Tuskegee to the sharecroppers by creating a moveable school. Through the philanthropic support of Morris K Jessup, a New York financier, the Jessup Wagon was developed.

Fast forward 100+ years, N Search of Hip Hop Xpress was created by Dr. William M. Patterson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The idea was to create a mobile media classroom, technology showcase, and sound machine that was designed to capture stories and teach Hip Hop generations, the descendants of southern sharecroppers, how to build and sustain community "one record at a time." video
Posted by Dr. William M. Patterson at 4:02 AM 0 comments

William Patterson

Summer 2010

Anna Tutt Honeys: Senior Citizens of Champaign County Folder

Senior Citizens, Women's Groups

Started by Iva "Big Honey" Matthews in 1969. File includes information on her husband, Henry Matthews.

ca. 1969-1975

News-Gazette August 7 2010 clippings

Re-development, Policing, Youth

Articles on Champaign Police Youth Development Program and Park Street Re-Development Project

News-Gazette

7 August 2010 clippings

Dave Monk Memories of Park Street Mural continued

Park Street Mural, Dave Monk

Search "Dave Monk" for other type recollections and opinions.

Dave Monk

17 May 2010

Erika Natalie Louise Harold biography

Cotillion, Miss America

Biography of future Miss America, Erika Harold, from Urbana. Featured in Cotillion

1997

Drug Selling: A Rational Choice

Drugs, North End, Crime, Gangs

Research based on years of data collection and analysis in Champaign-Urbana. From chapter: "In this chapter, the facts and conditions in the optimistic scene we
have just painted change. Instead of a bright employment future and its
DRUG SELLING: A RATIONAL CHOICE 193
lifelong benefits, what would your course of life be if you were born into a
community- socially and economically isolated from the community that
has all of the good jobs? Adding to community isolation, let us propose
you were in your early twenties and had a poor education (less than high
school) or a low level of education (high school) and no opportunities to
gain employment training or a job within your own community. If you
could secure a job in the main community, it would be a low-paying,
dead-end j ob with no benefits. Further, let us propose that you commonly
use drugs like marijuana, belong to a youth gang, and have been arrested
many times. Enhancing that dismal scene, your parents have drug and
alcohol dependency and/or addiction, poor levels of education, poor
to mediocre employment histories, are most likely unemployed at any
time in the year, have convictions on a range of felonies, and have served
prison terms. Still further,· let us propose that all your friends were like
you: poor and badly educated with families like yours, which means you
can get no help from them in finding a job.
In this chapter, we will discuss how young women the age of college
. coeds cope with virtually insurmountable social and economic barriers
in a poor community that has been socially and economically isolated
for more than eighty years. We will show that selling illegal drugs to
earn a living is a rational choice in such an isolated community. Finally,
we will discuss solutions to these types of social problems so prevalent
in modem America."

Mark S. Fleisher and Jessie L. Krienert

Crime and employment: critical issues in crime reduction for corrections; edited by Jessie L. Krienert and Mark S. Fleisher

AltaMira Press

2004