Good to see Vietnamese man helping out the Hmong and Black community in St. Paul

[theking]

 :

...another homegrown distribution event in neighboring St. Paul also ran out of masks fast in an area with a heavy concentration of black and Asian American residents, including many Hmong refugee families.

Hoang Murphy, himself the son of refugees from Vietnam, was among the volunteers there with Sanitize the Cities. He moved fast, trying to catch as many people as possible. In one burst, he found ready takers in an older Asian woman, a black woman, a man from El Salvador and a pair of landscapers, one Latino and the other white, who pulled up in a pickup truck and rolled down the passenger-side window to pick up two masks for themselves.

Murphy, who runs a nonprofit organization and is campaigning for a state legislative seat, kept going even as rain started falling. “We’re only as safe as our most vulnerable neighbor,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m healthy if you are not.”

Mayor Melvin Carter (D), who was elected in 2017 as St. Paul’s first black mayor, has set up a working group of municipal staff and community leaders to coordinate its coronavirus response in the African American community. Like other cities with populations under 500,000, St. Paul hasn’t received any aid through the Cares Act that Congress