By Garry Blanson
In October of 2025, Facebook finally “began payouts” from the “2022 class action lawsuit” that resulted from the “Cambridge Analytica scandal,” and other privacy violations. In order to have qualified for receiving settlement funds, you must have registered by December of 2022 and used Facebook in the United States between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022.
Additionally, last month, in June 2026, Facebook “began a second round of payouts.” Despite people receiving less than $40 per claim during the “first round” of payouts, and less than $10 during the “second round” of payouts, “I for one was elated to receive any money at all from Facebook!” By the way, “there are rumors stirring about another class action lawsuit about to be filed against Facebook soon!”
With that said, it’s time for me to inform everyone about “the 50 year anniversary of the B. D. Robinson commissioned Black Bicentennial Report.”
Some 50 years ago, Bernie Dayton Robinson chose a select group of Black individuals to “form a special committee called, ‘The Black Bicentennial Committee of Ouachita Parish.'” The committee’s task was to create a report that documented many of the achievements and accomplishments of Black people in Ouachita Parish from 1776–1976.
“Today, I am pleased to say that two copies of the Black Bicentennial Committee’s findings were able to be preserved for future generations!”
By the way, the two copies are presently stored in the genealogy department at the main library on Stubbs Avenue in Monroe, Louisiana.
Interestingly enough, some of the families that are included in the report include: the Richard Barrington family, the Maryland Brooks family, the William Medlock family, the Burg Jones family, the Henry Carroll family, the Raymond O. Pierce family, the Hattie McClanahan family, the William Dunn family, the Charlie Ballard family, the Isac Burnett family, the Abraham Bowie family, and many other former Black pioneering families of Ouachita Parish.
In closing, it is my hope that more Black citizens in Monroe and Ouachita Parish will take the time and take their children to the main library to read “The Black Bicentennial Report” that was completed by B. D. Robinson and the Black Bicentennial Committee of Ouachita Parish back in 1976!
