This Week On Urban Focus

Adrian Fenty
The issues and challenges of leading cities in a troubling economy serve as the focal point of this edition of Urban Focus. Two mayor’s discuss their distinctive records of solving their cities’ problems and the toll those records have taken on them, politically.
Adrian M. Fenty, the mayor of Washington D.C. discusses his record on education, his recent Democratic primary defeat for a second term and his plans for the future. Four years ago, he carried every one of Washington D.C.’s wards in his first bid for mayor of that city. But Mr. Fenty lost in the recent Democratic primary to Vincent Gray, the chairman of Washington’s City Council.

Micheal Fauntroy
Also, Michael Fauntroy, a political commentator and a professor of public policy at George Mason University, offers his perspectives of the mayoralty of Mayor Fenty and what the mayor’s loss in the primary means for other black elected officials. Also, Mr. Fauntroy talks about the implications for the coming midterm elections of the Tea Party movement.

Alvin Parks Jr.
In separate interview, East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks Jr, who is at the helm of the one of the nation’s most heavily African-American municipalities, talks about the difficulties of running the small, urban city on the banks of the Mississippi River.
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Urban Focus is broadcast nation-wide via the Internet every Wednesday from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. at http://streaming.intacs.com/clients/medgarevers. In Brooklyn, the program will be aired on BCAT TV on Channel 70 (Cablevision), Channel 56 (Time Warner), Channel 44 (Verizon ) and Channel 84 (RCN). Urban Focus will be broadcast every Wednesday from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. and programs will be archived here on the DuBois Bunche Center’s website.
Through interviews with politicians, policy makers, industry practitioners, scholars and expert analysts, Urban Focus will explore a range of issues that affect underserved communities and communities of color from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to Cape Town, South Africa. The discussions will serve to both draw attention to problems and highlight solutions for issues of concern to these communities.


[...] of the hat to Mike DeBonis at the Post for discovering this interesting interview between Mayor Adrian Fenty and Jonathan P. Hicks at the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy in [...]