COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Annie J. Easley (April 23, 1933 - June 25, 2011) was an African-American computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist who was born on April 23, 1933, in Birmingham, Alabama, and died June 25, 2011, in Cleveland, Ohio. She worked for the Lewis Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). She was a leading member of the team which developed software for the Centaur rocket stage and one of the first African-Americans in her field.
Annie J. Easley was born to Samuel Bird Easley and Mary Melvina Hoover and was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. In the days before the Civil Rights Movement, educational and career opportunities for African American children were very limited. African American children were educated separately from white children and their schools were most often inferior to white schools. Annie was fortunate in that her mother told her that she could be anything she wanted but she would have to work at it. She encouraged her to get a good education and from the fifth grade through high school, she attended a parochial school and was valedictorian of her graduating class.
After high school she went to New Orleans, Louisiana, to Xavier University, then an African-American Roman Catholic University, where she majored in pharmacy for about two years.
In 1954, she returned to Birmingham briefly. As part of the Jim Crow laws that established and maintained racial inequality, African Americans were required to pass an onerous literacy test and pay a poll tax in order to vote. She remembers the test giver looking at her application and saying only, "You went to Xavier University. Two dollars." Subsequently, she helped other African Americans prepare for the test. In 1963, racial segregation of Birmingham's downtown merchants ended as a result of the Birmingham campaign, and in 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment outlawed the poll tax in Federal elections. But it was not until 1965 that the Voting Rights Act eliminated the literacy test.
Shortly thereafter, she married and moved to Cleveland with the intention of continuing her studies. Unfortunately, the local university had ended its pharmacy program a short time before and no nearby alternative existed.
In 1955, she read a local newspaper article about a story on twin sisters who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) as "computers" and the next day she applied for a job. Within two weeks she was hired, one of four African Americans of about 2500 employees......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Every day, Gwen Jimmere contemplates an unusual object: a life-size cutout of the television producer and writer Shonda Rhimes that she keeps in her home office.
“When I’m marketing something, I say, Would Shonda want this?” Jimmere says. “And if Shonda doesn’t want it, my target customer isn’t going to want it. Because Shonda is the target customer.”
That hasn’t always been her way, though. As she tells us in this episode of Working, which you can listen to in the player above, when she moved to Detroit almost a decade ago, she was handling digital marketing for Ford. When that job ended, her entrepreneurial spirit took over. She found herself trying to market products designed for women with curly hair that she was making at home. Soon enough, that project gave rise to her company, Naturalicious.
When Jimmere first started selling her products, she was operating out of Detroit’s Eastern Market, a destination for many local farmers—and the shoppers who come in search of their goods. “What was nice about it was there were very few beauty product vendors, so I kind of stood out,” she tells us. Though the early days were a struggle, especially financially, within a few months, Jimmere managed to place her products on the shelves of a regional Whole Foods location. Her business has expanded considerably from there, and now she sells her line through stores across the country.
Her production process has expanded in tandem with her growing clientele. Today, Jimmere operates out of Ponyride, a sort of combination startup incubator/maker space in Detroit that houses a handful of other small businesses making everything from T-shirts to furniture. Where she once mixed her products on her kitchen counter, she now has a whole team working for her. “We hire special needs workers to work on our production line. That was my way of having a social impact to my business,” she says.
Gwen Jimmere
Photo illustration by
Slate. Photo byTasneem Penn.
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How do Americans perceive the discrimination faced by its own minority groups? It depends on whom you ask.
The idea that certain groups misjudge the amount of discrimination that other groups struggle with is probably not such a shock. But more surprising may well be what’s one of the clearest indicators of perspective on bias in America: faith.
One of the most notable markers of difference in how people perceive prejudice in America turns out to be faith identity. The American Values Atlas by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute reveals marked discrepancies in how members of different faith traditions perceive prejudice against African Americans, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community. The biggest divide? As Dr. Robert Jones, PRRI’s CEO and author of The End of White Christian America, told Vox, it’s between “white Christian groups — and everybody else."
The AVA is based on 40,000 telephone interviews conducted across all 50 states. On average, the study found that 63 percent of Americans acknowledged “a lot” of discrimination against immigrants, 57 percent against black people, and 58 percent against gay and lesbian people. Overall, about two-thirds of Americans see discrimination against at least one minority group as an issue, with 42 percent identifying discrimination as an issue among all three groups.
But among white Christians, those figures dropped significantly: Only 36 percent of white evangelicals, 50 percent of white mainline Protestants, and 47 percent of white Catholics reported perceiving discrimination against black people (the survey did not ask about other races). For contrast, 86 percent of black Protestants reported perceiving “a lot” of discrimination against black people in America, as did 67 percent of the religiously unaffiliated. Even higher proportions of Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Unitarians reported discrimination.
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The city of Philadelphia recently learned that the rainbow flag, a symbol of LGBTQ pride, isn’t quite as unifying as it may seem.
For Pride Month, Philly added two colors — black and brown — to the existing pride flag, and hoisted it outside City Hall. The colors, according to the Philadelphia Office of LGBT Affairs’ More Color More Pride campaign, represent inclusion of people of color in the LGBTQ community.
“In 1978, artist Gilbert Baker designed the original rainbow flag,” the campaign states. “So much has happened since then. A lot of good, but there’s more we can do. Especially when it comes to recognizing people of color in the LGBTQ+ community. To fuel this important conversation, we’ve expanded the colors of the flag to include black and brown.”
Philadelphia’s initiative to be more inclusionary toward nonwhite LGBTQ people comes from a good place, but its reception has been marked by controversy. The flag has historically represented LGBTQ people as a whole, and critics of Philly’s changes to it believe those changes are unnecessary, since the flag is already a symbol of unity.
“The stripes [on the original rainbow flag] were not chosen for skin color — they were chosen to reflect the spectrum of color in nature,” a longtime friend of Baker’s, Charley Beal told NBC. “The only thing we would ask is that other people would not take it and put Gilbert’s name on it, because they didn’t do it in consultation with him, and he didn’t do it.” (Baker died earlier this year, on March 31.)
Though Beal believes that Philly’s adaptation of the rainbow flag should be viewed as an independent symbol from the one Baker created, he acknowledged that he supports the intentions behind it. That’s a lot more elegant than some of the conversation surrounding the new flag, like people asking for a white stripe, or people claiming that adding to the two colors to the flag is disrespectful or that it’s racist for not explicitly including white people.
And those sentiments have been met with a vocal, spirited response:
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Ethiopia is suffering from severe drought, but there is water in Gergera. 20 years of restoring its hills and river valley has brought life back to this area of the Tigray region in the country’s far north.
The work has been painstaking, complex and multidimensional and continues to this day. But the hard-won results offer up two key lessons. We know now that landscape restoration in drylands hinges on water management. And we know, just as importantly, that restoration can create a base for better livelihoods and jobs for youth who formerly left in droves.
Government ministers visited the revitalised watershed on 31 May 2017 after signing a memo of understanding to establish a National Agroforestry Platform to support climate-resilient green growth and transformation. Over 40 prominent figures attended, including ministers of state Kaba Urgesa and Gebregziabher Gebreyohannes, Wubalem Tadesse of the Ethiopian Environment and Forest Research Institute, Fassil Kebede, adviser to the minister of agriculture, and Eleni Gabre Madhin, founder of Ethiopia’s commodity exchange and representatives of embassies, development agencies, and civil society groups such as Oxfam, Farm Africa, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and Packard.
Gergera watershed covers 1382 hectares in the kebele (Ethiopia’s smallest administrative unit) of Hayelom in Atsbi-Wonberta district in the eastern zone of Tigray. The visit began at the head of the valley where community leaders had gathered. Alighting and looking around, Ethiopia’s minister of agriculture and natural resources Eyasu Abraha was visibly moved. “I know this place. It was abandoned and untouched. This is very incredible to me,” he said.
The group stood under tall trees, bathed by bird song, with luscious grasses and pools of clean water at their feet. So that it can regenerate, this part of Gergera has long been closed to cattle. “The first thing you notice is the change of vegetation,” said World Agroforestry Centre’s director general Tony Simons, pointing out a Sclerocarya birrea, the Marula tree which has a nutritious plum-like fruit with a kernel with oil prized for cosmetics by firms such as the Body Shop.
By consent of the community, only cutting and carrying grass to livestock and beekeeping are permissible in this upper catchment. Indeed, the wooded hillsides are rife with carefully placed hives. Gabions (mesh cages filled with rocks) built by members of the community slow the rain water when it courses down the chasm, which, formerly too deep to cross, is gradually filling as earth builds up behind the structures. Critically, this earth now retains rainwater, which seeps into the ground and emerges as groundwater in the valley where 1,000 hectares of land are now under small scale irrigation. Meanwhile, more tree cover on the hills means that when surface water does reach the valley, it does so with less destructive velocity.
Water is now abundant in Gergera after “treatment” of the catchment with gabions, planting of trees and elephant grass, and natural regeneration of vegetation Photograph: Cathy Watson/ICRAF
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The finding is based on analysis of more than 60 million police stops in 20 states from 2011 to 2015. The database, the largest collection of traffic-stop data ever compiled, was made public Monday by the Stanford Open Policing Project. More than 20 million Americans annually are stopped for traffic violations, according to the study.
Researchers from Stanford’s Computational Journalism Lab and the School of Engineering found that black drivers are generally stopped at a higher rate than white motorists, and Latinos are stopped at a similar or lower rate than whites, after adjusting for age, gender, time and location.
After being stopped, black and Latino drivers are ticketed, searched and arrested more often than whites. For example, when pulled over for speeding, black drivers are 20% more likely than whites and Latino drivers 30% more likely than whites to be ticketed. Black and Latino drivers are about twice as likely to be searched compared with whites.
The findings come as phone and dash cam videos of black and Latino motorists being stopped in violent encounters have filled the airwaves. Images like that of Texas motorist Sandra Bland, an African American who later died in jail, being confronted violently by a state trooper have fueled the debate, according to the study’s authors.
The study found that in Los Angeles County, black drivers are stopped more than whites and Latinos.
For every 100 black drivers, about 15 were pulled over, compared with 10 stops for every 100 white and Latino driver. Black drivers in the county were searched six times per 100 stops; the rate for Latinos was four searches per 100 stops and for whites, two searches per 100 stops.
A screenshot of Stanford's interactive chart shows the rates of police stops of motorists by race in California. (Stanford Open Policing Project)
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