The New Orleans Tribune

We Are One
Lawrence Martin, president of
Nola.TV, breaks ground on a
new building and new community collaboration called “Sanjari One”

The humming of buzz saws saturates the building in a screeching, unending echo. Hammers to nails, through sheets of rock add to the melody. It’s a harmonic symphony familiar in post-Katrina New Orleans. Travel up four flights of stairs pass unpainted wooden planks, blueprints and plastic tarps where the fusion of sounds intensifies to a construction crescendo. Lawrence Martin is the maestro of this renovation orchestra, and by the spring of 2012, he hopes to transform 1332 Oretha C. Haley Blvd. (the former site of the historic Free Southern Theater) into the new headquarters for Nola.TV and its encompassing community outreach initiative Sanjari One.

A community celebration and ribbon cutting for the Sanjari One building was held last November.

“I am very excited about this grand opening because I believe Sanjari One will serve as a multipurpose center for the community,” Martin said then. “It’s a place where ideas are shared, voices heard and an appreciation of the rich culture and jewels of our community. Moreover, it is an opportunity to join with others in helping to move our community forward in a positive manner. I believe it will provide a bridge to help Greater New Orleans learn more about the advantages that Sanjari One brings to the public.”

Martin, much like the sounds emanating through the building, goes from an easy and workman-like tone to fiery and boisterous passion when talking about the future of Nola.TV.

“We try to maintain a very grass roots perspective,” he says. “We do what they [the mass media] don’t do. We go into the trenches, and we’re not looking at costs. We’re more concerned about getting the truth about the stories and the facts!”

No stranger to the trenches, Martin was raised in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans by his parents, Loretta Martin, who he describes as “a divine angel” and Lawrence Martin, Sr., whose avid readership of Time magazine piqued the boy’s interest in news and information at a young age.

Then, in 1972, during a frontline protest on conditions at the then Desire Projects, Martin was mistaken for a troublemaker which prompted a double-barreled reaction that would change his life. He came face-to-face with his own mortality, as a contentious standoff with policemen who pointed rifles inches away from his head.

“I looked the man in his eyes; I looked down the barrel of that gun and I watched that finger. In my mind I could see the blast coming,” he says, his voice vibrating with intensity. “I never forget, I walked away from that, and I got on my knees and cried.”

It was from this moment he says that his passion for covering civil injustice and community activism was cultivated. But he still didn’t know how to apply this blooming trait. It would take a trip to the west coast to hone his abilities.

Inspired by Jet magazine layouts in the early seventies and his own interest in photo-journalism, Martin went to Contra Costa College in Richmond, Calif., where advertising and ad design became his calling. Blessed with the gift for gab, he helped create a fashion magazine called BABE (Bay Area Black Esquire). He also became the photographer and ad manager for his college newspaper. Those experiences many years ago, he says, help to lay the foundation Nola.TV.

Created in December 2003, Nola.TV is a web-based television station that concentrates on grass-roots and independent story shaping and offers an alternative approach to the news by focusing on perspectives from people in the urban community directly affected by the content. Running the gamut, it provides local news, weather, sports, arts and entertainment through a variety of streamed channels located on its home web page, www.nola.tv.

“NOLA.TV has expanded to include video coverage of town hall meetings, city council and other official government announcements, with a spin on the truth as we see it. It's not misguided. It does not misrepresent nor allow others to insult the intelligence of our community,” Martin says.

Over the years, Nola.TV broadcasts have covered a myriad of topics from the community perspective, ranging from exposing reaction to the 2009 “walk-out” by city council members before citizens could speak during the public comment portion of a meeting to applauding new business openings in the Ninth Ward. It highlighted the community’s support of two local Black-owned businesses when their sanitation contracts came under fire from city officials. It has celebrated community festivals, has provided content that fostered community discussion on the public housing, crime and post-Katrina rebuilding efforts, and aired shows that celebrated art and music—all in a way that resonated with the average New Orleanian.

Today, Martin is bursting at the seams when he thinks about the future of Nola.TV. Where one might see an empty room, he sees a studio and anchor desk. As he stands atop the apex of the studio’s sun-soaked roof, he envisions live-shots of local news stories to the backdrop of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. You can see his mind clicking with every step, and he knows the future is now.

“Nola.TV becomes whatever our generation is willing to pass on. I hope to inspire a number of people so that we can better know the direction that our community needs to go in and all the realms that effect us, whether it be social, political or economically. I hope we can make an impact in these areas by providing accurate information.”

Demographically, Martin says the Nola.TV has a wide-ranging audience, with nearly 60 percent of its viewers in professional occupations.

“Often (mainstream mass media) will stereotype us. That person’s story in their heart is true, but the way they portray that person that may be having a hard time articulating themselves is where the major media is making a mistake, and I think Nola.TV attracts a different audience because it strives to be different.”

This difference is one Martin doesn’t just apply to Nola.TV, but also to a new community collaborative that will also be housed at this new site. With his good friend and business partner, Tanda Armstrong, they created “Sanjari One,” which means “working together as one”. This will be the new umbrella that will encompass Nola.TV, the Asante Awards Festival Foundation, and Community Connections Program - a social service agency that provides help to the elderly and disabled.

The latter employs workers who aid over 200 families throughout the state, and will be based on the third floor of the new building. Martin credits the idea and inspiration to Armstrong, who essentially started the Community Connections program in 1999 by reaching out to help about 10 families in need.

“She has a ‘we can do it’ spirit like no one I have ever met,” he says of Armstrong. “She stands up for the rights of the people that she serves, and she takes on that fight daily.”

Like the stand that holds the studio’s digital web camera, the final connection to this tripod is the Asante Awards Festival Foundation. Asante, which means “thank you” in Swahili, is the theme of an annual awards ceremony that highlights and celebrates many local African American artists and community leaders whose accomplishments would otherwise go unnoticed.

Held at the Mahalia Jackson Theater each year, and supported by government and local business leaders alike, it already has four award ceremonies under its belt. The ceremony, which attracts nearly 2,000 people each year, has included tributes to local musical legends like Kermit Ruffins, Gina Brown, Troy “Trombone Shorty,” the Hot 8 Brass Band and a host of others.

Martin can barely keep still when discussing this element of the operation.

“My mama said to me, ‘we all don’t know how to pray, but we can always start off by saying thank you, Lord.’ Little did I know that some 40 years later I would end up with a foundation that means ‘thank you’,” he says. “We’re a foundation that addresses the street-sweepers, the bed makers, the dish-washers—the everyday people in—addition to those who are esteemed in their areas of discipline like music, or medicine, and so on. But all of them are on the stage together. We have a responsibility to polish our cultural assets, and that’s what I’m about. We have to be able to understand what it is to be a community in business, in social development, in health, in love, and in economics.”

Those challenges read like the preview guide on Nola.TV’s streamed program line-up. Undaunted Martin hopes this new breeding ground will open even more opportunities for those willing to take advantage. With the musical score of rebuilding sounds filling the building, he says, “we still got some work to do.”