| |
 Host: Ernie Manouse
Tony Freemantle, Houston Chronicle Metro Editor
The Metro Editor directs the City and Suburban staffs and is responsible for local coverage.
Freemantle has been with the Chronicle for 25 years. He joined the staff in 1982 as a general assignment reporter and became an assistant city editor in 1984. Four years later he began a 10-year stint as a national reporter,  covering a variety of big stories around the nation and around the world, including the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accord and the South African elections in 1994.
He was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for international reporting for a four-part series entitled "Crying For Justice," which documented human rights abuses in South Africa, Rwanda, El Salvador and Guatemala.
As a senior writer on the Metro and Projects desks, he wrote in depth about the U.S. space program following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and documented the lives of illegal immigrants in Houston. His most recent assignment was writing coach.
top
Carol Mims Galloway, Secretary, HoustonISD/President, Houston NAACP
Carol Mims Galloway was elected to the Board of Education in December 2007 for her third nonconsecutive term. In 1991, Galloway was elected and served two terms as an HISD board member. In 2008, she was chosen by her  colleagues to serve as secretary.
Galloway is the first African-American woman to represent District II, and in 1999, she was also the first African-American woman to represent District B on the Houston City Council where she served three terms.
Galloway's commitment to education includes roles as PTA president, a member of the Houston Area Urban League Education Committee, and a member of the Texas Education Agency Advisory Committee for Technology. She was appointed by U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee to the National Commission for African-American Education as the representative for the 18th Congressional District.
Galloway has held the position of president of the NAACP Houston Branch, and she has served on the Communities in Schools board and Northeast YMCA board. Former Mayor Kathy Whitmire appointed Galloway as the affirmative-action commissioner and Kashmere Gardens redevelopment commissioner for the City of Houston.
Galloway is a member of numerous organizations, including the National Congress of Black Women, Inc.; National Women of Achievement; Top Ladies of Distinction, Inc.; National Council of Negro Women; American Leadership Forum-Class X; Harris County Black Democrats; Harris County Black Caucus; Labor Council for Latin American Advancement; Northeast Concerned Citizen League; and Kashmere Gardens Baptist Church.
Galloway's awards and honors include UNCF Distinguished Lou Rawls Parade of Stars Leadership Award, National NAACP Benjamin Hook Keeper of the Flame Award, and Top Lady of the Year 1995.
Galloway was previously employed as a representative with Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, the AFL-CIO, and the Houston Federation of Teachers.
A native Houstonian, Galloway attended Phillis Wheatley High School, San Jacinto Junior College, and the University of Houston. She has been married for more than 50 years to Albertus Galloway Sr. They have one son, two daughters, eight grandchildren, and two great grandsons.
top
Chief Harold Hurtt,
Houston Police Department
A veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Hurtt began his law enforcement career as a patrolman in the Phoenix Department in 1968. He retired in 1992 to become chief of the Oxnard, California, Police Department. He returned to the Phoenix  Police Department as its chief in April 1998.
Hurtt is a noted proponent of the “community policing” concept. He has been innovative, helping institute neighborhood police storefronts. He incorporated the Oxnard Police Department's cable television program, “Street Beat,” into that department's community policing effort. In Phoenix, he instituted his “knock-and-talk” campaign, going door to door in that city's neighborhoods to listen to residents' concerns about police and community issues. He also led efforts to increase the number of officers who speak Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese in the diverse Phoenix community.
In 2002, Hurtt was selected by his peers as president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization of the 57 largest police forces in the Unites States and Canada. When the nation's second-largest police force, in Los Angeles, was ordered by a federal court consent decree to undergo major reforms in 2001, Hurtt was chosen among a select team of monitors to oversee that effort.
Violent crime rates have fallen more than 9 percent during Hurtt's tenure as chief in Phoenix. Property crime fell about 4 percent. Crime rates decreased nearly 30 percent during his time as chief in Oxnard.
Hurtt graduated from Arizona State University in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in sociology. He earned a master's degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix in 1991.
Hurtt, 57, was born in Campbell County, Virginia. He and his wife, Lonetta, have four grown children and six grandchildren.
top
Dr. Stephen Klineberg, Rice University Sociology Professor
A graduate of Haverford College near Philadelphia, with an M.A. from the University of Paris and a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stephen Klineberg joined Rice University’s Sociology Department in 1972, after teaching at Princeton.
In 1982, he and his students initiated the annual “Houston Area Survey,” now in its 27th year of systematic studies of the changing demographic patterns, experiences, attitudes, and beliefs of Harris County residents. The recipient of ten major teaching awards at Rice and a frequent public speaker, Klineberg is currently at work on a book that explores the ways the public is responding to the economic and demographic transformations of Houston and America.
top
Rev. William A. Lawson, The William A. Lawson Institute for Peace and Prosperity
Rev. William Alexander Lawson is the founding Pastor of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church located in Houston, Texas. Established in March 1962 with 13 members, the congregation has grown in excess of 3,500 members. The initial emphasis of the church was to help meet the spiritual needs of Baptists in a transitional community near Texas Southern University, but has become one of  the leading Baptist churches in the city of Houston.
Early in his career, Rev. Lawson served as Director of the Baptist Student Union and Professor of Bible at Texas Southern University in Houston. He shared in the formation of the first Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Houston, where he taught classes in Sociology and the Black Church. Rev. Lawson is a community and social action leader. He conceived and organized the United Way’s Houston Homeless Initiative in response to the growing number of homeless and jobless persons. More than $4 million was raised in a four-year period in support of that initiative. He established a service agency, incorporated in the State of Texas to serve community needs of citizens in the inner city, the Central City Comprehensive Community Center. Rev. Lawson created a program to register and mobilize voters in the predominantly African American precincts of the city.
In 1996, a group of friends gifted to Rev. Lawson a non-profit organization called the William A. Lawson Institute for Peace & Prosperity (’WALlPP”), which aims at bridging the gap between the powerful and the powerless. Through this institute, Rev. Lawson has brought attention to a very overgrown cemetery -Olivewood Cemetery - the oldest African American cemetery in the city of Houston; was the conduit that brought together all those businesses and organizations affected by the METRO rail system traveling down Main Street, eventually to be known as The Main Street Coalition; and created a school within the Houston Independent School District - the WALIPP Preparatory Academy - the first charter school for boys grades 6 through 8 in the nation. He is the recipient of the 1991 Silver Beaver Award in support of Scouting. He organized and sponsored the area’s largest and most productive scouting program. In its 35-year history, Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church’s troops have produced over 100 Eagles.
Rev. Lawson did his undergraduate work at Tennessee A&I State University, Nashville, Tennessee where he received a Bachelor of Arts Degree, returning to deliver the 1962 Baccalaureate address. He graduated cum laude from Central Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Kansas where he received the Master of Theology and the Bachelor of Divinity degrees. While there, he majored in New Testament Interpretation and was appointed Teaching Fellow in Homiletics. In 1986 he received an Honorary Doctor of Divinity from Howard Payne University, in Brownwood, Texas; and in 1993, he received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Houston.
Rev. Lawson is married to Audrey H. Lawson. They have four children - Melanie, Cheryl, Eric and Roxanne - and two grandchildren - Robyn and Raven.
top
 Dr. Laura Oren, University of Houston Law Center Professor of Law
Co-Director of the Center for Children, Law & Policy
B.A., Queens College; M.Phil., Yale; Ph.D., Yale; J.D., University of Houston Law
Professor Oren has a Ph.D. in British history from Yale University and graduated first in her class at the University of Houston Law Center in 1980. After graduation, she was in private practice, specializing in civil rights (Section 1983) law and appellate work.
Professor Oren teaches Family Law and Constitutional Law and her scholarship has often been about the intersection of these two fields. Her specialty areas of research have been in Civil Rights (Section 1983) and Family Law, and she also teaches Women and the Law, Conflict of Laws, and State and Local Government Law.
top
Judge Josefina Rendón, Mediator
 Josefina Rendón has been providing mediation services in Houston, Texas, at Rendon Mediation for thirteen years, working with lawyers, courts, and government agencies to meet the needs of individual, corporate, and governmental clients. As a bilingual mediator with both training and experience working with multicultural clients, she brings invaluable expertise to the process of alternative dispute resolution. She is a former judge of Houston Municipal Court #5 and has been a mediator for thirteen years and a third-party neutral for 26 years. She is past president of the Texas Association of Mediators and has served as editor of The Texas Mediator newsletter.
Her client base includes attorneys in Houston, Galveston, Pasadena, Beaumont, La Porte, League City, Port Arthur, and Texas City, as well as EEOC offices in Texas and Louisiana and the U.S. Postal Service.
top
Cherry Steinwender, Center for the Healing of Racism
 Cherry Steinwender is a founder and serves as Co-Executive Director of the Center for the Healing of Racism. Founded in 1989, the Center for the Healing of Racism is an ethnically diverse, non-profit (501.C.3.) corporation located in Houston, Texas and was founded on the principle that the disease of racism mars the unity of the human race. Through her work with the Center for the Healing of Racism, Mrs. Steinwender helped to develop Dialogue: Racism, a nine-session or two-day seminar that examines the history and sociological phenomenon of racism in the United States. In these seminars, an ethnically diverse group comes together to explore and begin the process of healing racism. Mrs. Steinwender has regularly conducted the Dialogue: Racism seminars since 1990. Additionally, Mrs. Steinwender has conducted workshops for counselors, social workers, various municipal agencies, church groups, as well as for elementary, high school and university faculty and students. She has also conducted intensive weekend workshops in cities across the United States to aid communities in establishing local programs to deal with the issue of racism. Cherry Steinwender served on the Houston Community College (Central Campus) Racial Awareness Program (RAP), a task force established to engender a greater understanding of the problem of racism in the campus community, on the Advisory Board for the Center for Principle Leadership, as well as on the Advisory Council of the Office of Reconciliation Ministries. Mrs. Steinwender has received numerous awards and honors for her steadfast work in dismantling racism.
top
Ernie Manouse, Anchor/Producer - HoustonPBS
"(Ernie is) among the best interviewers I had ever experienced. His intellect, charm and charisma make for television that is informative and entertaining. In the course of conducting a superb interview, he conveys his talent, humor, intelligence, compassion, understanding and wit."
-Walter Cronkite
Emmy Nominated Ernie Manouse broke into the national scene by beating out both Oprah Winfrey and Ted Koppel in securing the only interview granted by Stella Byrd, the mother of Jasper dragging death victim James Byrd, Jr.
A native of Binghamton, New York and a graduate of Loyola University Chicago, Manouse started with NBC Network News, then moved into radio with WLS in Chicago, and back to TV at HoustonPBS. With a naturally inquisitive nature, and a gift for gab, Ernie has worked his way through all aspects of talk – from producing a sex therapy show to hosting his own brand of chat and magazine programs. Manouse can be seen on PBS Stations across the country on his Emmy nominated series "InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse," or hosting numerous pledge and entertainment specials, including three of public television’s most successful pledge events with Suze Orman.
Houstonians first got to know Ernie from his six years hosting and producing the daily magazine program WeekNight Edition (which evolved into WeekDAY). Manouse's honors include KATIE Awards, Emmy nominations, Viewers choice regognition and Houston Chronicle's Ultimate Interviewer title. Internationally, Ernie is featured on the Houston episode of PrideVision’s world travel show “BUMP!”
In his off-time, Ernie keeps busy working within the community by donating his time to several causes. He has become a popular Master of Ceremonies and Host for events as diverse as The Pride Parade, the U.S. Military Ball, and the Cattle Baron’s Ball. Manouse currently serves on the advisory board of STAGES Theatre, and the Dominic Walsh Dance Theatre.
In October 2002, Ernie helped to create and producer the primetime magazine "the connection," which he hosted for two years.
In 2004, Manouse launched the syndicated series “InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse,” which lead Manouse to win an unprecedented five consecutive KATIE Award for outstanding Interview/Talk Show for the southern region presented by the Press Club of Dallas. Now in it's 5th season, this award winning series is distributed nationally to PBS stations across the country, and is currently airing in over 80 cities in the U.S. and the Virgin Islands. The show takes Ernie back to what he loves doing best – unedited, one on one interviews with noted personalities.
Another area Ernie enjoys is late night talk, and in early 2005, Manouse launched a late night chat fest. “The After Party” combines arts coverage, with up beat fun interviews reminiscent of Jack Parr's "Tonight Show". The series was a hit with critics and audiences alike, garnering the coveted Emmy nomination for Best Entertainment/Variety program in it’s first season. Also in 2005, Manouse received an Emmy nomination as Best On-Air Talent (non-news) for his current body of work.
2007 featured the launch of ErnieOnTV.com - Ernie's online home; increase in circulation of "The Friends of Ernie" newsletter; and even a Fan based MySpace page. TV-wise, Ernie produced the arts documentary "The Last 24" featuring the Dominic Walsh Dance Theatre.
top
|
|
| |
 |
|
|
