Sean Bell Community Center Opens in New York
Asraa Mustufa, Colorlines | May 23, 2011


Five years after Sean Bell was killed in a hail of police gunfire, a community center named in his honor opened Friday in the Jamaica, Queens neighborhood where he grew up.

The Sean Elijah Bell Community Center plans to offer tutoring and mentoring programs for kids, and GED and job training programs for adults starting next month. The center was funded by a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant and hopes to become an after-school haven for local youth, aiming to serve between 2,000 and 5,000 people a year.

“Someone was taken away from us and we want to try to save some other people,” Bell’s father William Bell told The New York Daily News. “There’s so many things that could be done in our neighborhood.”  (Read more)