Famed Harlem Church in New York Celebrates 200 Years

IHT -- When the Abyssinian Baptist Church was founded, Thomas Jefferson was president. Abraham Lincoln was not born yet. Blacks were still enslaved, and would be for decades more.

A group of Ethiopian sea traders in lower Manhattan refused to participate in segregated church services and formed their own congregation, naming it for their homeland and taking many free blacks from other churches with them.

Two hundred years later, the church is going back to its roots — literally.

Come September, the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III will lead a pilgrimage of about 200 church members and dignitaries on a pilgrimage to Ethiopia to mark the bicentennial anniversary of the church.

The trip, he says, will highlight an observance that begins on Tuesday and will end in November 2008, the actual 200th anniversary of the church's origin.

"It was the first 'mega church' of 2,000 members in the country," Butts said in an interview. "We want to celebrate what that experience means, we want to talk about community development, spiritual renewal, and of course the history of Abyssinian Baptist as the primary and premier religious institution in Harlem."

Overall, Butts said, the bicentennial is intended to commemorate the spiritual, social and cultural history of the black community, and in particular "the significant role played by the churches as that community's oldest and strongest institutions."

Jefferson, president from 1801-1809, never visited the church, as far as is known, but Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson did, as did Jimmy Carter as a candidate. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also made one appearance there in the late 1950s or early 1960s, Butts said.

The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, pastor at the time, "was known then as 'Mr. Civil Rights,' but he acknowledged Dr. King," he said.

Butts said the planned pilgrimage to Ethiopia has several purposes, including "fellowship with the Ethiopians," missionary work, the creation of an orphanage for the offspring of AIDS victims, and a ceremony at the grave of Ethiopia's legendary Emperor, Haile Selassie, who died in 1975, age 81, after a lifetime of defying invaders and seeking independence for his and other African nations.

The platform guest list for Tuesday's kickoff included Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Charles Rangel. While not expected to be present, Mayor Michael Bloomberg prepared a proclamation declaring Abyssinian Baptist Church Day.

Others on the program were Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who has written a Mass composition for the celebration; Cornel West, professor of religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, and Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which will present a special exhibit for the bicentennial.

West and Maya Angelou are among five co-authors of a book, "Witness," that traces the Abyssinian church's two centuries of history.

The church occupied at least two different sites in lower Manhattan before Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., moved it uptown to Harlem in 1923, according to Tai Foster, a church spokesman.

Today, the congregation is about 4,000, the largest black congregation in New York state. It is one of several Harlem churches whose dynamic, music-filled Sunday services draw crowds of European tourists.

"They come out of curiosity, and then they tell their friends back in Italy, France and Israel, and we welcome them as well," Butts said.

Is There an Electron in the House? A Conversation with Electron Kebebew

Electron Kebebew

Science Cafe -- Naming a child can sometimes stamp a child.

So is it any wonder what an Ethiopian electrical engineer had in mind when he named his son Electron?

But while engineering may have been in the boy's blood, this youngest of five children — with siblings named Positron, Neutron, Deutron and Proton — grew up to have medicine in his heart.

Now, as a UCSF endocrine surgeon and a research scientist, Electron Kebebew, MD, operates on both bodies and genes. He has become, well, a force, a man on the move, someone who commands attention as he strides the hallways of UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion.

"When you have a name like Electron, people notice you, and they have expectations of you," he says. "But by and large, as I think back on my life, my name has been a positive influence."

Positivism is what the 39-year-old Kebebew exudes. And why not? The former UCSF resident embodies the renewed bench-to-bedside spirit of today's medicine.

"Translational medicine is the term that best describes my life right now," says Kebebew, who has not one, but two clinical trials underway at UCSF's Comprehensive Cancer Center. One pivots around his research into the genetic signatures of endocrine tumors. The second examines how to make aggressive thyroid cancer more responsive to treatment.

"Chemotherapy doesn't work for most patients with aggressive thyroid cancer," Kebebew explains. "And radioiodine treatment doesn't work either because thyroid cancer cells don't capture iodine like normal thyroid cells do. What we're now testing is a diabetes drug, called rosiglitazone, which causes cancer cells to re-express the gene that takes up iodine. What is unique and exciting about the approach is that we're not using cytotoxic drugs to kill cancer. We're just retraining the cell to do something it has lost the ability to do.

"We're not billing this as a cure. For most people, it could just mean that their life is prolonged. But in those patients where the response to radioiodine is complete across all tumor cells, a cure is at least possible."

Call it an engineer's hunch, but early results show that an eight-week dose of the drug restores iodine uptake in some patients. While Kebebew maps out his next steps in that trial, he also is recruiting patients for a diagnostic study.

"In about 30 percent of cases, we can't tell if the thyroid is cancerous or not, so we end up operating on patients to get a diagnosis. I have been doing genetic array studies to find out if we can identify biomarkers for nonmalignant tumors that would make diagnostic surgeries unnecessary." Kebebew thinks he's on the right track: He filed a patent on the biomarkers last year and has now recruited one-quarter of the 600 patients he needs to prove the test's worth.

Worth is a good word to use, too. There are some 150,000 diagnostic thyroid surgeries performed in the United States each year. Throw in the cost of care, and each one tallies about $15,000. This is not counting the expense of the second operation should the first prove that cancer has taken root.

"The study is designed around predictive value; we still need to prove that the biomarker test generates false negatives less than 2.5 percent of the time. All in all, we're probably about three years away from being able to use it to make clinical decisions, assuming that everything works as we hope," Kebebew adds, flashing a confident smile.

Others straddling the midline between research and the operating room might find smiles hard to come by. Kebebew, instead, enjoys the hands-on problem solving.

Watch out, adrenal tumors, another disease that can hide its cancerous nature from various scans. Kebebew is developing biomarkers for you, too, thanks in part to a 20-year-old UCSF Mount Zion tissue bank that has more than 100 tumor samples stored.

It's an ambitious agenda for a chemical engineering undergraduate who never planned on attending medical school, let alone become a de facto spokesperson for a new kind of clinical research. "I think the NIH needs to better define — and fund — translational research, so that it includes not only the kind of basic science that might be many years away from a clinical application, but also the kind of basic research that has an immediate impact on patients."

Kebebew understands, of course, that he is an anomaly. But he makes no apologies for how he sees the problem. Beneath the blue scrubs, an engineer still plans and plots.

"I became a doctor because I wanted to be able to have a major impact on another person's life. My engineer's training has made me more analytical. I think in terms of cause and effect."

So far, the effects have all been promising. And if they stay that way, we might all have a reason to remember Electron Kebebew for more than his high-powered name.

In Memoriam: Anthony Mitchell

Associated Press reporter Anthony Mitchell with wife Catherine Fitzgibbon, son Tom, left, and daughter Rose in this July 30, 2006, family photo taken in Nairobi, Kenya. Anthony Mitchell was a passenger aboard a Kenya Airways plane which crashed early Saturday May 5, in Mbanga Pongo, Cameroon. Aviation officials have said Monday May 7, 2007, that the plane carrying 114 people nose-dived into a thick mangrove forest, disintegrating on impact and making the likelihood of survivors slim. Mitchell was returning home from an assignment in the region.(AP Photo/Family handout photo) (Family Handout - AP)

Washington Post -- NAIROBI, Kenya -- Anthony Mitchell, among the 114 people that an official said were killed in a plane crash over the weekend in Cameroon, was a dogged Associated Press correspondent from Britain with a passion for Africa and for uncovering challenging stories. He had been on assignment to investigate the criminal trade in endangered species for food.

Mitchell, 39, had just spent a week in the Central African Republic, where he visited markets that sold elephant meat and chimps and gorillas to international smugglers. His stories were to be published before an international conference on the topic next month.

"We are all devastated," said Catherine Fitzgibbon, his wife, in a statement on behalf of Mitchell's family. "Anthony was a fantastic father, husband and son. He was the life and soul of every party with a wonderful dry wit and a great sense of humor. He lived life to the full and died doing the job he loved."

Mitchell made global headlines last month with his in-depth investigation into the illegal detention and transfer of terror suspects from Kenya to Somalia and eventually into Ethiopian prisons. His work forced U.S. and Ethiopian officials to acknowledge a program that until then had led to the secret detention of dozens of people, including women and children.

Human rights groups praised the story, which won an internal AP award for breaking news, but it was stridently criticized by the Ethiopian government as coming from an "ivory tower" where the war on terror was not understood. It was not the first time Mitchell's stories angered Ethiopian authorities.

During the May 2005 election, Mitchell repeatedly uncovered government efforts to influence the vote's outcome and obtained secret European Union reports that detailed allegations of rigging.

In January 2006, the Ethiopian government expelled him for what it called hostile reporting. The expulsion was roundly condemned by press freedom groups around the world. He became a staff reporter for AP in the Nairobi bureau the following August.

On Sunday, contributors to Ethiopian political Web sites posted tributes to Mitchell, praising him as a dedicated journalist who courageously reported the truth.

"Anthony was an extraordinarily talented and dedicated journalist," said AP President and CEO Tom Curley. "His loss will be deeply felt at AP and to anyone who cares about Africa and its future."

"He was one of our top reporters in Africa," said John Daniszewski, the AP international editor in New York. "We will never forget the sacrifice he made and the courage he showed in Ethiopia and on his other assignments."

Mitchell was born in Chertsey, England and moved to Africa in 2001 with Fitzgibbon to work and live in Ethiopia where she was an aid worker. He soon became one of the most widely respected journalists in the country.

He first contributed to the Associated Press in 2001 and as a freelancer in Ethiopia also contributed to The Times of London, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent. He became AP's Ethiopia correspondent in 2003.

Before moving to Ethiopia, he worked for the Daily Express from 1996-2001, covering international affairs, particularly the conflicts in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Mitchell covered London courts and national news events for the National News Agency in London from 1995-1996. His first journalism job began in 1993, as a reporter for The Richmond and Twickenham Times.

Mitchell graduated from York University in 1993, where he studied philosophy and politics.

"Wherever he has worked in the world he has made new friends and earned respect for acts of personal kindness and his professional integrity," Fitzgibbon said. "Anthony also had a very gentle, caring side; he was devoted to his family and our two gorgeous children."

He is survived by Fitzgibbon, son Tom, 3, daughter Rose, 1, parents John and Jackie Mitchell and his sister Jo Jotischky.