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Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City. From WNYC. It's Friday, October 31st. Happy Halloween. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill.

Michael Hill: Mayor Adams has given community kitchens and food pantries a $15 million boost in anticipation of the cutoff date for SNAP benefits tomorrow. The mayor this morning said the money is part of an all hands on deck approach as available SNAP funds run out. The Trump administration instructed states earlier this month not to give out November benefits as the government shutdown drags on. The White House says there are insufficient funds for the program. New York and 24 other states are suing the Trump administration for refusing to use emergency funds for SNAP. A full list of resources for SNAP recipients is available on the city website. New York City's comptroller says the NYPD is failing to meet deadlines for turning over video of police encounters. WNYC's Ben Feuerherd has more.

Ben Feuerherd: An audit by the comptroller's office looked at requests submitted through the Freedom of Information Law for body camera footage from 2020 through 2024. The audit found the police department did not respond to more than half of the requests within the standard 95 business days. In many cases, the department did not turn over footage until a requester filed an appeal. After an appeal was filed, 97% of the requests were granted. In response to the audit, the NYPD said it would take steps to improve responses by adding employees to the legal bureau. The response also noted the department takes issue with some of the audit's findings and its methodology.

Michael Hill: It's a windy, windy Halloween. 54 with clouds down with the wind advisory from noon until midnight. Mostly sunny today, mid-50s for high temperatures and breezy, but the wind gusts, up to 50 miles an hour. Tonight, mid-40s and breezy. Wind gusts, 43 miles an hour.

Janae Pierre: Stay close. There's more after the break.

Speaker: NYC, NYC, NYC.

Michael Hill: Beatings that are used to force submission or punishment. It's a painful vestige of slavery in America and one of the many traumas rooted in the Black experience that mental health experts say continue to affect communities of color. Now, the Harlem Family Institute is taking on this legacy. The nonprofit is looking to train a new generation of psychoanalysts mindful of the connections between the past and present. That was the focus of a discussion hosted by the Schomburg Center in Harlem earlier this year.

The event drew locals interested in hearing best selling author, Lee Hawkins. He described the belt beatings he received at the hands of his father, an experience he captured in his book, I Am Nobody's Slave.

Lee Hawkins: I was five years old. He literally beat the child out of me.

Michael Hill: Hawkins traced the harsh beatings to colonial America.

Lee Hawkins: So we can't just put this negro in the workhouse, he's got to have the lash. He lacks the intellectual capacity to be reasoned with.

Michael Hill: He says generations applied the same kind of punishment, including his father.

Lee Hawkins: My father couldn't talk about it because he was afraid to talk about it, because he couldn't find the language to talk about it.

Michael Hill: Hawkins says that has to change.

Lee Hawkins: We have to understand the unique situation of descendants of slavery and Jim Crow, because America hasn't gotten the language right. What has happened is Black people have been through our own holocaust without any ability to even process it as such because we're living on the site of terror, where it happened. We don't have separation from it.

Michael Hill: As it turns out, it was Hawkins' father who encouraged him to seek professional help to finish writing the book. Hawkins started sessions with psychotherapist Lee Jenkins in Harlem. Jenkins endured and survived a segregated America. He was a college roommate of the late congressmember and civil rights icon, John Lewis, who coined the phrase good trouble.

Congressman John Lewis: The movement taught me to take the hard look, the long look. That our struggle is not just a struggle for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, a few years. It is a struggle of a lifetime. Maybe many lifetimes.

Michael Hill: That was Congressman John Lewis on WNYC in 2012, about ridding the country of its segregation laws known as Jim Crow.

Lee Hawkins: Let me tell you, having a Jim Crow survivor as a therapist is the ultimate example of cultural competency in real life. It's so important. We need all of our people to be trained to understand the unique set of issues that Black people are coming in.

Michael Hill: Hawkins is now helping the Harlem Family Institute recruit culturally competent people to train to become psychoanalysts with an eye toward eventually practicing in the institute's affiliated new mental health clinic, the Margaret Morgan Lawrence Child and Family Development Center on East 110th Street, set to open in November. The institute says it cannot quantify the specific need for mental health in Harlem, but federal data shows Black Americans are more likely to experience a mental health concern, and less likely than other groups to receive treatment. This as the suicide rate for Black Americans rises.

Sheila Johnson: There's so much pain in our community. We know how to transform that pain into power.

Michael Hill: The institute's deputy executive director is Sheila Johnson. She will run the new clinic. Johnson says it'll have a hyper focus on generational trauma, systemic inequality, and structural racism. Johnson is Black.

Sheila Johnson: We're the only ones that can heal us. I'm sorry. That might be controversial, but why is it that when you have a Black physician, survival rates are stronger when you have young Black mothers?

Michael Hill: Behavioral Therapist Rachel Booker is one of two recruits. Booker is Johnson's assistant. She's enrolled in a clinical psychology program and eager to learn more and do more.

Rachel Booker: I don't want to focus on fixing people with just strategies, but helping people understand themselves at a more deeper core level.

Michael Hill: One early challenge is looming cuts to Medicaid. The institute estimates roughly a third of Harlem residents have health insurance through Medicaid. Institute President and Executive Director Michael Connolly.

Michael Connolly: That's going to be deeply problematic for us, and especially for those individuals. We will do all that we can to help them.

Michael Hill: Johnson says the clinic has signed up 22 private insurance companies. Has applied for grants and will outsource human resources in other departments and will have a small staff of permanent employees on the payroll. In the audience that night at the Schomburg, Bonnie Harrison, born in the south. She's run a psychotherapy practice in Harlem for decades. Harrison says she advocated in the 1960s for what the institute is pursuing now, but--

Bonnie Harrison: I was informed that, well, you can't do that. You can't focus on just something for healing Black people, because it's going to turn white people off and you're going to need white people.

Michael Hill: Six decades later, author Lee Hawkins says his book writing journey cast doubt on just any therapist being able to help him finish I Am Nobody's Slave.

Lee Hawkins: That could not be addressed by a therapist who doesn't have this background. It couldn't. I would just be ending up counseling the therapist.

Michael Hill: Michael Hill, WNYC News.

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Janae Pierre: Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now, from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you this evening.

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