--Go to www.UnityFirst.com for the following stories---
1) Laila Ali, the daughter of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, is shown during her recent visit to New York's Penn Station in support of an anti-smoking campaign.
2) A new book about Halle Berry by Christopher John Farley
3) Learn about the NV Awards 2K3 and nominate an urban professional or entrepreneur to be recognized in one of New York's best business magazines, New Vision in Business. Deadline for entries is Nov. 28.

---White flight---
More than one in three Whites interviewed in Detroit, Boston, and Atlanta said they would move if their neighborhoods reached varying levels of racial integration, according to a study published in the November issue of the journal, Demography. "Declining property values and concerns about quality-of-life issues such as crime topped the list of reasons they gave," reported Maria Krysan, a University of Illinois at Chicago sociologist, who examined the responses of 1,600 randomly selected white residents in the three cities. "Overt expressions of racial prejudice were not uncommon," she said. "But most often, Whites painted a negative picture of integrated neighborhoods, pointing to crime, graffiti, drug use, and declining property values to explain their desire to leave." However, she said, "expecting property values to decline and crime rates to go up if African Americans move into a neighborhood is fundamentally a negative stereotype." She added that stable Black middle-class neighborhoods and vibrant integrated communities do exist, and blaming African Americans for the problems in poor urban neighborhoods "ignores the discriminatory practices in the mortgage, real estate, and insurance industries, and government policies that helped create the situations." White residents of the Detroit metropolitan area were particularly likely to say they would leave one of the integrating neighborhoods. White Atlantans were slightly less likely than White Bostonians to say they would leave a majority-Black neighborhood. "The most highly educated respondents cited property values as the reason for wanting to move," she said. Respondents who said they would stay in a neighborhood with a single black household tended to be more educated and more likely female than those who said they would leave. But she did not find that education level played a role in whether they would stay or leave neighborhoods with a larger share of Black households. "Education only made Whites more tolerant of token levels of integration," she said.

---Catalyst Census marks gains for women---
Even as the economy continues to stagnate, women in corporate America are experiencing upward movement. In Catalyst's 2002 Catalyst Census of Women Corporate Officers and Top Earners, women currently represent 15.7 percent of corporate officers in America's 500 largest companies up from 12.5 percent in 2000 and 8.7 percent in 1995, when Catalyst began counting. "In down economies women have been generally hit harder than their male counterparts in the workplace, but in the Catalyst Census, we find the numbers of women at the top are increasing, however slowly," said Sheila Wellington, President Catalyst, "2,140 out of 13,673 corporate officers are women. "Catalyst finds the percentage of women of color officers has increased in 2002 to 1.6 percent compared to 1.3 percent in 1999 and 2000. Of the 163 women of color corporate officers: 106 are African American, 30 are Asian-American/Pacific Islander, 25 are Hispanic and 2 reported their race/ethnicity as "other" "We are finally seeing some movement in women of color at the top, albeit slight, but the numbers are minuscule. Smart executives are investing today in mid-level women of color to ensure the best pool of talent for corporate leadership tomorrow," concludes Wellington. "They understand this will give them the competitive edge in the global marketplace." Catalyst is a nonprofit research and advisory organization working to advance women in business and the professions.

---An excerpt from an article by John Conyers, Jr.: SBC: Stop Blaming Victimized Consumers---John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Democrat, U.S. House Judiciary Committee, recently published an article, "SBC: Stop Blaming Victimized Consumers," which can be read in its entirety on www.UnityFirst.com. Here is an excerpt: "Several decades ago, Jim Crow segregationalists had the gall to blame African American communities for the poverty and other ills that befell us as a result of what was then an American apartheid. Indeed, to veterans of civil rights wars, the "blame-the-victim" tactic is a well-known perversity employed by powerful elite seeking to consolidate illegitimate power. Today there is a new, thinly disguised attempt to blame the victim. Its sponsors are the giant conglomerates that Business Week refers to as the last American monopoly: the local telephone company, SBC Communications Inc. (SBC) and its sister Bell companies that choke consumers with monopoly pricing of our telecommunications services. SBC/Ameritech is now laying off over 11,000 of its workers -- jobs that will disproportionately hit African American workers in the communications industry. And, it is blaming the job cuts on consumers who want to preserve the 1996 Telecommunications Act because it lowers their local telephone and Internet charges by giving them choice to use other telecom companies….. And, if SBC is able to reclaim its unchecked monopoly, the digital divide will only widen "a digital divide which puts African Americans on the off-ramp of the information superhighway." To see the full article, go to www.unityfirst.com or for more information, send email to: ofield@erols.com.

---New York's 'Harlem Song' continues-
HARLEM SONG, the fabulous play about Harlem, New York at the historic Apollo Theater had almost shut its doors due to the lack of funding when good news came and commitments were made to enable the show to continue its scheduled run through December 31, 2002. Strong ticket sales and a unique coalition of funders, including the New York/Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone and the Rockefeller Foundation, have joined the New York City Investment Fund and the AOL Time Warner Foundation to support the Apollo Theater and HARLEM SONG. The New York City Investment Fund also helped coordinate funding among a number of entities, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Citigroup Foundation, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Merrill Lynch & Co., and the Wolfensohn Family Foundation. Tickets for HARLEM SONG are available at the Apollo Theater box office, 253 W. 125th Street. Tickets are also available through Ticketmaster ticket centers and charge by phone (212) 307-7171 and online at Harlemsong.com. For more detailed information about the show, send an email to penpower@villagenet.com.

---Crack: Up In Smoke ---
In the mid 1980s, crack cocaine swept through our nation's inner cities with phenomenal force and exacted a devastating toll on the Black community by destroying families, lives and careers in its path. Almost two decades later, Black Entertainment Television will air a week-long special series entitled "Crack: Up In Smoke" beginning Monday, November 25. The series will chronicle the impact this epidemic has had on African Americans and dispel the myth that the crisis is over. The series will also explore the crack cocaine sentencing disparity, and the drug's influence on youth through the glorification of drug dealing in hip-hop music and films. One segment will focus on economics with an analysis of the regional impact of crack on such urban areas as Baltimore, Washington D.C., Miami and Los Angeles. Also, look for special World AIDS Day programming on December 1.

---World AIDS Day Programming---
World AIDS Day will be commemorated globally on Sunday, December 1. To date, an estimated 40 million people globally are living with HIV/AIDS. In the United States alone, African Americans make up almost 38% of all AIDS cases, despite making up only 12% of the total population. Even though African-American and Hispanic women together represent less than one-fourth of all U.S. women, they account for 78% of reported AIDS cases. Additionally, African-American children represent an estimated 65% of all reported pediatric AIDS cases. A study released this week found among drug injectors, African Americans are five times as likely to get HIV than whites and Latinos are one-and-a-half times as likely. The study also found that 50 to 80 percent of needle drug users become hepatitis C positive within six to 12 months of beginning injection drug use, making up for about half of new hepatitis C cases in the U.S.

---The electorate---
The gay, lesbian and bisexual community made up five percent of the electorate during the 2002 midterm elections, according to a poll released by the Human Rights Campaign. In the current political climate, 5 percent of the vote is often the entire margin of victory," said HRC Communications Director and Senior Strategist David M. Smith. In the last four consecutive elections, the gay community has consistently represented four to five percent of the electorate. Comparatively, according to the Voter News Service in the 2000 elections, African-American voters comprised 10 percent of the electorate, Hispanic voters seven percent, Jewish four percent and Asians two percent of the overall voting population.

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