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Brothers Lean on “Granny,” Aunt, One Another After Covid-19 Loss

HOWARD UNIVERSITY NEWS SERVICE — According to a new modeling study published in Pediatrics, a child loses a parent or guardian in one of every four COVID-19 deaths, a devastating consequence that is affecting the lives of an estimated 140,000 children.
The post Brothers Lean on “Granny,” Aunt, One Another After Covid-19 Loss first appeared on BlackPressUSA.

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3 years ago

May 3, 2022

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PAINDEMIC PAIN: Mending Unseen Wounds

Black and Brown families have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. So have their children. According to the National Institutes of Health, tens of thousands of children have lost at least one parent or caregiver to COVID-19. Half of them are Black or Brown. This is one in a three-part series looking at how their lives have changed.

By Ahnayah Hughes, Howard University News Service

At first glance, they are just five rambunctious brothers doing what boys their ages do.

They like bouncing on their trampoline, riding their scooters, tossing around a football and playing video games. One is particularly fond of reading.

They are an especially tight-knit bunch.

There is Kingston, 10, the oldest, who their grandmother, Betty Hamilton, nicknamed “The Enforcer.” He makes sure the youngest get their baths and say their nightly prayers, she said.

“He’s like a little parent,” said Hamilton, 65, who retired on disability nine years ago after working 18 years at Pulaski State Prison, the women’s prison in Hawkinsville, Georgia.

Kristian, 9, has his own description for his brother.

“Sometimes he can be a bit bossy,” he said.

Kristian is the avid reader. He enjoys adventure books, drawing cartoons and is quickly moving to the next level on the Minecraft series.

“If the rest of them are outside, he’s somewhere inside with his nose in a book,” Hamilton said.

Kendall, 8, has autism and needs things to be just so, their grandmother said.

“He is very independent and wants to take his time figuring out things for himself,” she said. “He needs to do it on his own, in his own way, and he always gets it.”

Kobe, 5, is extremely smart, and he’ll let you know it, said his aunt, Carla Hamilton, 42, a registered nurse in Snellville, Georgia, 32 miles southeast of Atlanta by car. Their mother was her younger sister and only sibling.

“I had to tell him to stop calling people dumb!” she said.

And then there is the baby, Kassius, 4.

“I call him Cassius Clay,” his grandmother said, alluding the birth name of boxing icon Muhammad Ali. “He’s rough and tough. He’s always ready to fight and get his way.”

All five boys live with her in a three-bedroom house in Eastman, Georgia, with their grandmother and grandfather, Curtis Hamilton. Curtis Hamilton who holds the distinction of being the first Black National Guardsman in Eastman.

They have been reunited with brother and mother’s oldest child, Camarian, 14, who has been living there for the past three years.

Each is unique yet bound together by a common emotional scar. They share a pain and a deep fear left by COVID-19.

The signs are subtle, their grandmother said. For example, if one of them gets a cold or has the sniffles, they are quick to tell her, so she can immediately take preventive measure, or they will ask her for medicine, she said.

“They panic a little when anyone gets sick,” Hamilton said. “When their uncle got COVID, they were distraught. They thought COVID was a death sentence for everyone.”

To them, it is.

It’s the reason Kingston asked his grandmother one day, “Did my dad get his shot? If he did, would he still be living?”

It was Aug. 8, 2021, when their father, Ken Williams, a manager for a fast food restaurant in Warner Robbins, Georgia, was diagnosed with COVID-19.

Their mother, Courtney Hamilton, had died three years earlier in an automobile accident in Perry, Georgia. She was 27.

“It was a huge shock for all of us,” Carla said of her death. “You always think you have to be strong for the kids, but really, they were so strong for us.”

The couple had never married. Their relationship, family members said, was off-and-on.

After their mother’s death, their grandmother and their Aunt Carla moved in temporarily to help take care of them.

They stayed together five months until the father moved out with the boys and continued to move, five times in three years, the family said. Sometimes the boys stayed with relatives, sometimes with his girlfriend.

Still, their father set the rules and the tone, the family said. He was their primary caregiver, but more than anything, he was their father, a man who was consistently in their lives.

The kids were living with Williams’ girlfriend when he was diagnosed. The children were quickly quarantined away from their father and kept out of school, though they didn’t know exactly why at the time, their grandmother said.

Williams entered the hospital Aug. 20 in Warner-Robbins. Three days later, he was dead. He was 37.

“They were devastated,” their grandmother said. “For the past three years, he was the sole provider for them.”

The next time the five saw their father was at his wake before his cremation. He was in a casket alongside another casket that held his 57-year-old father, Kenneth Williams, who had died a day earlier of unrelated causes.

With Williams’ death, his sons joined tens of thousands of children in the U.S. who have experienced the loss of one or both parents to the COVID-19. According to a new modeling study published in Pediatrics, a child loses a parent or guardian in one of every four COVID-19 deaths, a devastating consequence that is affecting the lives of an estimated 140,000 children.

After their father’s death, their grandmother and their aunt scurried to gather all the documents related to children – school, medical and birth records — and the boys moved into Carla Hamilton’s four-bedroom house with her five children in Snellville.

Kingston, 10, right, and his aunt, Carla Hamilton, have become even closer following the death of his mother, Hamilton’s younger sister and only sibling, in a car accident in 2018, and the death of his father from COVID-19 in August. Hamilton took in Kingston and his brother following their father’s death before they moved to live with their grandmother in Eastman, Georgia. Photo courtesy of the Hamilton family.

The property owner, however, said their presence was a violation of Hamilton’s lease. The children were forced to move again, this time with their grandmother, who had been keeping Camarian Hamilton, since his mother’s death.

These days, the four oldest boys are enrolled in South Dodge Elementary School, and Kassius is in pre-kindergarten, his grandmother said. Camarian, attends Dodge County High School.

Having responsibility for the care and feeding of five boys thrust upon them at the age most people retire would be considered a burden by many, but not the boys’ grandmother.

“I’m loving every minute of it,” Hamilton said. “Having all of them in the house really gives me a good purpose for living. I never realized how much I stayed in the house and did nothing but watch TV. But with them here, there’s something to do constantly.”

The boys seem to like it too, according to “The Enforcer.”

“I think it’s good [living with Granny],” Kingston said. “I like living down here. I like my new school. I like that most of my family lives here, and we get to see Cam and our cousins.

“I do my chores. I help my grandma and Pop Pop. I help with Kassius and Kobe. I just like being helpful.”

Their aunt said she has seen a change in the five.

“There’s a feeling of relief,” she said. “They’re settled. They’re calm. They’re finally stable, and they know they’re not going anywhere.”

Outwardly, the boys seem fine, Betty Hamilton said. She has noticed, however, they don’t talk much about their parents unless it’s among each other.

Their grandmother said, the boys put her on notice they want vaccinations as soon as possible.

“They want the shots,” she said. “They let me know that. They don’t have them yet, but as soon as I can find out where they can get them, I’ll get them.”

She has enrolled them in counseling.

“Everybody grieves differently,” she said. “This is the first week. The counselor will meet them on a one-on-one basis. I wanted them to be able to talk and not be scared something is going to happen to me.

“I want them to be kids and not have to worry about things like that.”

Every year on their mother’s birthday, the boys release six purple balloons—her favorite color—at her gravesite in Chauncey, Georgia, 15 miles from their home., their grandmother said. This year, a month after Williams’ passing the boys asked if they could get six red balloons in his honor and release them all together.

While chatting among themselves, Kingston said, “Well, my mom got a big old birthday present today!”

He was asked if he was talking about the balloons.

“No,” he said. “I’m talking about my dad. They’re together in heaven.”

Even on the days when the boys ask tough questions, like every time they hear anything on the news about COVID-19, or have the occasional nightmare, they appear to be at peace, their family said.

“All six of them are together again, and I think that’s how my daughter and Ken would have liked it,” their grandmother said. “I think they’re happy, because they know this is where they’ll be from now on.”

The post Brothers Lean on “Granny,” Aunt, One Another After Covid-19 Loss first appeared on BlackPressUSA.

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Rep. Al Green Files Articles of Impeachment Against President Trump

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — Rep. Green told Newsweek that he is moving on impeachment now before “tanks are rolling down the street.”

Published

5 days ago

May 19, 2025

Oakland Post

By Lauren Burke

Congressman Al Green (D-TX) has filed articles of impeachment against President Trump. Rep. Green, 77, has served in Congress since 2005. President Trump is the only President who has been impeached twice by the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Green told Newsweek that he is moving on impeachment now before “tanks are rolling down the street.” The impeachment resolution filed by Rep. Green on May 19, states that President Trump is, “unfit to represent the American values of decency and morality, respectability and civility, honesty, and propriety, reputability, and integrity, is unfit to defend the ideals that have made America great, is unfit to defend liberty and justice for all as extolled in the Pledge of Allegiance, is unfit to defend the American ideal of all persons being created equal as exalted in the Declaration of Independence, is unfit to ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare and to ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity as lauded in the preamble to the United States Constitution, is unfit to protect government of the people…” Whether Rep. Green can force a vote in the U.S. House on impeachment remains an unknown issue. President Trump was impeached on December 18, 2019, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He was then impeached a second time on January 13, 2021, for “Incitement of insurrection” in the wake of the violent January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters.

The White House stated Black Press USA on Rep. Green’s effort to impeach the President. “This week, Democrats ousted their DNC ‘leader,’ opposed the largest tax cut in history, and were exposed for actively covering up Joe Biden’s four-year cognitive decline. Now, Democrats have turned their sights to threatening impeachment. We are witnessing the collapse of the Democrat Party before our eyes. Not a single one of these efforts will help the American people. The contrast could not be more clear: President Trump is fighting for historic tax relief for the American people, Democrats are fighting themselves,” said White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly in a written statement. Several decisions and legal interpretations by the Trump Administration are currently being challenged in federal court. On May 15, the U.S. Supreme Court debated the issue of birthright citizenship after a legal challenge on the issue by the Trump Administration.

During that legal challenge, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson challenged Trump’s solicitor general Dean John Sauer by saying, “Your argument seems to turn our justice system into a catch-me-if-you-can kind of regime … where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.” Rep. Green’s impeachment resolution also focused on the issue of ignoring judicial orders by the executive branch. A notable example was the deportation case of Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Garcia was deported to a prison in El Salvador by federal officials on March 15, 2025.“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it. To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’” “You have no mandate,” Congressman Green stood up and yelled at President Trump during his State of the Union Speech on March 4. After the incident, Republicans who control the U.S. House considered sanctioning Rep. Green, but they did not complete an action against him.

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Affordable Childcare Remains a Barrier: Solutions in New Report

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — We also still haven’t put a dent in affordability for working families. That’s why we urgently need increased funding and new solutions.”

Published

5 days ago

May 19, 2025

Oakland Post

While America’s childcare supply grew nationally, the price of that care continues to rise—placing affordable, high-quality care out of reach for many families. A new report released by Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA), Child Care in America: 2024 Price & Supply, shows that despite promising signs of increased supply, affordability remains a major barrier — and underscores the need for increased sustained federal and state investment.

From 2023 to 2024, the number of childcare centers increased by 1.6% (to 92,613) and the supply of licensed family childcare (FCC) homes increased by 4.8% (to 98,807). The national growth in FCC homes’ supply is driven largely by four states (CA, KS, MA, VA) and is especially notable as it reverses a year-long downward trend.

At the same time, the national average price for childcare rose by 29% from 2020 to 2024, outpacing inflation and exceeding other major family household expenses like rent or mortgage payments in many states. Childcare is now so expensive that it consumes 10% of a married couple with children’s median household income and a staggering 35% for a single parent. In most states, families pay more for childcare than rent, mortgage payments, or in-state university tuition.

“Childcare supply is increasing, and that is a win—but it’s not enough,” said Susan Gale Perry, Chief Executive Officer of CCAoA. “Recent federal and state pandemic-era investments have stabilized and grown supply in some places, but a significant supply gap still exists — especially in rural communities and for infants and toddlers. We also still haven’t put a dent in affordability for working families. That’s why we urgently need increased funding and new solutions.”

CCAoA’s Childcare in America: 2024 Price & Supply report also found that:

The average price of childcare increased by 29% from 2020 to 2024, outpacing the national inflation rate of 22%.
In 45 states plus Washington, DC, the average annual price of center-based childcare for two children exceeded mortgage payments, in some states by up to 78%.
In 49 states plus Washington, DC, the price of center-based childcare for two children exceeded median rent payments ranging from 19% to over 100%.
In 41 states plus Washington, DC, infant care in a center cost more than in-state university tuition.

CCAoA urges policymakers to increase childcare funding at both state and federal levels to maintain the momentum of growing supply, address rising prices, and expand access to childcare for families. Federal funding increases have fallen short of the need and our research shows that total state investments in child care or preschool vary widely from state to state, putting children, families, and communities across America on an uneven playing field. Further, targeted investments in childcare supply building and stabilization and childcare workforce recruitment and retention strategies are essential to help sustain an adequate supply of high-quality childcare options nationwide.

Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA) is the only national organization that supports every part of the childcare system. Together with an on-the-ground network of people doing the work in states and communities, it helps America become child care strong by providing research that drives effective practice and policy, building strong child care programs and professionals, helping families find and afford quality child care, delivering thought leadership to the military and direct service to its families, and providing a real-world understanding of what works and what doesn’t to spur policymakers into action and help them build solutions.

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Sex, Coercion, and Stardom: Diddy Case Mirrors Music’s Ugly History

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — It started with a Reddit post that didn’t just speculate on Diddy’s fate but questioned the very foundations of the culture that made him

Published

5 days ago

May 19, 2025

Stacy M. Brown

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

As Sean “Diddy” Combs faces a federal sex trafficking case and the slow unraveling of his once-untouchable legacy, a larger question looms: Is this the moment the music industry finally confronts its darkest secrets?

It started with a Reddit post that didn’t just speculate on Diddy’s fate but questioned the very foundations of the culture that made him: “How much damage could Diddy do to the state of hip hop?” the user asked. “Supposedly, he has incriminating evidence against those who attended his parties. The same parties that had a lot of bad things happen, to say the least.” The implication was chilling—if Diddy were to cooperate with federal authorities, the fallout might not stop at his feet. Names floated in the post—Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Usher, Justin Bieber—aren’t confirmed in any court filings, but their inclusion highlights the breadth of Diddy’s influence and the potential reach of any revelations. If even a fraction of the speculation proves true, the reverberations wouldn’t stop at hip-hop—they’d hit every corner of the music industry. For his part, Combs denies all allegations. His legal team has described the now-infamous “freak-offs” as consensual encounters, part of his non-monogamous lifestyle. But prosecutors allege something much more sinister: a criminal enterprise powered by the machinery of his music and business empire—one that trafficked women, coerced labor, obstructed justice, and used influence and intimidation to maintain control. Still, for all the headlines Combs generates, his alleged crimes do not exist in isolation. The music industry has long tolerated, enabled, and even glamorized behavior that would trigger career-ending consequences in other arenas. Diddy’s story might be shocking—but it’s not new.

Rock music has its own rogue’s gallery. Jerry Lee Lewis nearly destroyed his career in 1958 after marrying his 13-year-old cousin. Elvis Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu when he was 24 and later moved her into his home in Memphis. In more recent years, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler faced (and ultimately evaded) a lawsuit from a woman who says he sexually assaulted her in the 1970s when she was 17. A judge dismissed the case due to the statute of limitations. Phil Spector, the genius producer behind the “Wall of Sound,” died in prison after being convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson. Gary Glitter was convicted of possessing child pornography and later child sex abuse. Kid Rock and Creed frontman Scott Stapp were filmed with strippers in a sex tape that leaked online in 2006. A new biography of the Rolling Stones claims Mick Jagger had sexual relationships with at least two of his male bandmates, raising further questions about the power dynamics inside even the most celebrated groups.

Journalist Ann Powers, writing for NPR, once noted that the “history of rock turns on moments in which women and young boys were exploited in myriad financial, emotional and sexual ways.” Powers added: “From the teen-scream 1950s onward, one of the music’s fundamental functions has been to frame and express sexual feelings for and from the very young… relating to older men whose glamour and influence encourages trust, not caution.” This brings the spotlight back to Diddy—not just as an accused individual but as a symbol. He was once the archetype of success: Harlem-born mogul, founder of Bad Boy Records, and kingmaker behind artists like Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans, Ma$e, 112, and French Montana. He transformed hip-hop into a global business and amassed influence far beyond the recording booth. He sold more than 500 million records, earned multiple Grammy Awards, and was honored by MTV, Howard University, and the City of New York—until those honors were swiftly revoked after a video surfaced showing him physically assaulting singer Cassie Ventura. Ventura, his longtime partner and protégé, has accused Combs of brutal physical abuse and psychological control. Her lawsuit and the video evidence ignited a wave of allegations from other women and men, describing similar patterns of coercion, manipulation, and fear. “This is not just about bad behavior. This is about systemic exploitation and abuse made possible by fame, money, and silence,” said one advocate for survivors in the entertainment industry.

While hip-hop has long been a target of criticism for misogyny and violence, what’s now being laid bare is a broader, genre-defying truth: from rock and pop to hip-hop and beyond, the music industry has operated for decades without accountability for its biggest stars. “Sex isn’t the problem,” one Reddit user responded. “Coercion via job opportunities is.” Another added, “Zero [impact], just like R. Kelly and MJ did zero to R&B,” referencing the R&B superstar’s conviction and Michael Jackson’s controversial legacy. Others argued hip hop would endure, regardless of Combs’ fate. Maybe it will. But the Diddy scandal pulls back the curtain—not just on the parties, the rumors, or the headlines—but on an industry-wide culture that has, for too long, allowed power to shield predation. As one survivor put it outside a recent court appearance: “This isn’t just a hip hop problem. It’s not even just a music problem. It’s a power problem.” And now, the music industry has to decide: Will it finally tune in, or will it keep playing the same old song?