Nehemiah Corporation of America
Nehemiah Corporation of America is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, California specializing in homeownership, affordable housing and community development. It started in 1994 as a small organization, but grew to prominence later in the 1990s after it developed a program that allowed home buyers to make down payments on their purchases using funds that were derived from the home sellers. This program, the Nehemiah Program, became popular and was widely emulated, giving birth to what came to be known as the seller-funded down-payment assistance industry. The industry attracted criticism from U.S. federal agencies (particularly the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service) and was ultimately shut down in 2008 by a change in federal law.
Media in Omaha, Nebraska
The African American community in Omaha has had several newspapers serve it. The first was the "Progress", established in 1889 by Ferdinand L. Barnett. Cyrus D. Bell, an ex-slave, established the "Afro-American Sentinel" in 1892. In 1893 George F. Franklin started publishing the "Enterprise," later published by Thomas P. Mahammitt. It was the longest lived of any of the early African American newspapers published in Omaha. The best known and most widely read of all African American newspapers in the city was the "Omaha Monitor", established in 1915, edited and published by Reverend John Albert Williams. It stopped being published in 1929. In 1906, Lucille Skaggs Edwards published, The Women's Aurora, making her the first black woman to publish a magazine in Nebraska.George Wells Parker, co-founder of the Hamitic League of the World, founded the "New Era" in Omaha from 1920 through until 1926. The "Omaha Guide" was established by B.V. and C.C. Galloway in 1927. The "Guide", with a circulation of over twenty-five thousand and an advertisers' list including business firms from coast to coast, was the largest African American newspaper west of the Missouri River. The "Omaha Star", founded by Mildred Brown, began publication in 1938, and continues today as the only African American newspaper in Omaha.