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LOCAL News :: Civil & Human Rights

El-Amin Greene: Friday Funeral Will Mourn Passing of Community Leader

Community activist and ardent advocate of Pan Africanism El-Amin Greene died late last week of cancer. He was 46. He leaves behind his companion Delphia "Sweetie" Ellis, her son Kevon, his children and a large extended family of colleagues and supporters. Green's funeral will be held this Friday, January 23 at 2PM at Rhodes Funeral Home, 1018 W. 79th St. on Chicago's south side. Repast will follow at Bethel All Nations Church on Justine east of Ashland at 63rd St.
Community activist and ardent advocate of Pan Africanism El-Amin Greene died late last week of cancer. He was 46. He leaves behind his companion Delphia "Sweetie" Ellis, her son Kevon, his children and a large extended family of colleagues and supporters. Green's funeral will be held this Friday, January 23 at 2PM at Rhodes Funeral Home, 1018 W. 79th St. on Chicago's south side. Repast will follow at Bethel All Nations Church on Justine east of Ashland at 63rd St.

In 1988 Greene founded the Nkrumah-Washington Community Learning Center in Chicago's public housing system. The center took its name from Harold Washington, the city's first Black mayor, and Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the first African country to win independence and throw off the overt chains of colonial domination. In 1993 Greene moved NWCLL to the south side Englewood community, where he threw himself into the work of creating a collectivist learning and housing space that could help combat the joblessness and poverty endemic to the community.

NKCLL's educational philosophy was grounded in the belief that impoverished communities must create and control their own institutions, particularly if goals for social justice, economic equality and human rights are to develop, survive and thrive over the long term. Not long after its founding, NWCLCI was recognized by the Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) as a member of its national network of African-centered educational institutions committed to African-centered education.

Greene believed that the community flourishes or flounders depending on the life skills and grounding in a sense of community of its residents. At Nkrumah-Washington, he worked to build an institution where students and residents could think culturally and morally, where their sociological, psychological and academic needs could be attended to, and where the cycle of negative behavior and its transmission to the next generation could be transformed into a politically aware consciousness capable of organizing and fighting for economic and social justice.

Greene was a key organizer of the 1995 gang summit, and was well known to street organizations in the area as a peacemaker of passion and principle. He also worked extensively with fellow former inmates, and worked to help win the release from prison of Dr. Charles Knox, an initiator of the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities (IHRAAM), a non-profit international human rights NGO in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC). Over the past decade, IHRAAM has sought to promote public awareness of all legal instruments for minority and human rights protection as subscribed to by the United Nations and international law, particularly as it relates to the situation of formerly enslaved minorities in the Americas and elsewhere.
 
 

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