Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Dr. Alexa Canady-Davis was the first Woman and first African American to become a Neurosurgeon in America. From Lansing Michigan, Alexa Irene Canady is the daughter of Elizabeth Hortense (Golden) Canady and Clinton Canady Jr. Her father was a graduate of the School of Dentistry of Meharry Medical College, practicing in Lansing. Her mother was a graduate of Fiasco University was active for years in civic affairs of Lansing. She also served as national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
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Young Canady and her brother grew up outside Lansing and were the only two Black students in the entire school. Despite the obstacles, Canady was an exceptional student and named a National Achievement Scholar in 1967. She attended the University of Michigan, getting her BS, degree in 1971. After this came the University of Michigan, Medical School, and her M.D. cum laude in 1975. Canady’s Interned at Yale’s New Hane Hospital from 1975 to 1976, and an example of her non-recognition due to being Black and a woman came on her first day of her residency at Yale New Hane Hospital. She was appointed as first female and first black to a residency in neurosurgery. As she began making her rounds a hospital administrator referred to her as "the new equal-opportunity package." Despite the remark, Dr. Canady viewed her accomplishment as a double achievement for herself and both women and African Americans.
From there she went to the University of Minnesota in neurosurgery, from 1976 to 1981. She also worked at the University of Pennsylvania Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Ped Neurosurg from 1981-82. Currently, Canady is the director of neurosurgery at Children's Hospital in Detroit and a clinical associate professor at Wayne State University. Her Areas of Expertise are Craniofacial Abnormalities, Epilepsy, Hydrocephalus, Pediatric Neurosurgery, and Tumors of Spinal Cord and Brain. She has also added to special research topics such as assisting in the development of neuroendoscopic equipment, evaluating programmable pressure change valves in hydrocephalus, head injury, hydrocephalus and shunts, neuroendoscopy, and pregnancy complications of shunts......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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This is the story of a dinner party. New Jersey Star-Ledger:
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It occurred in a suburban middle-class community — maybe slightly upscale middle class, but not much — just outside one of our big cities. Pretty typical place.
The guests all knew each other. They were neighbors or friends or acquaintances who’d been to these parties many times. They were white, every one, mostly businessmen and their wives, and some engineers who work or once worked in the nearby defense industries.
The postdinner conversation was the usual stuff — who’s moving in, who’s moving out. Anybody heard from Ralph since he moved to Wisconsin? Nobody had. No surprise. Ralph wouldn’t tell you if your coat was on fire.
It was about at that point, as the conversation edged warily toward the touchy subject of politics, that one fellow — a bit of a curmudgeon — asked if anybody thought President Obama had not been born in America.
You could have heard a cocktail napkin drop.
For a moment, no one said a thing. People looked at one another. Then a lady who had moved to the area from Virginia raised her hand. “I do,” she said. One by one other hands were raised until it was clear most of guests thought Obama had not been born here.
Nobody said anything. Nobody had to. The verdict was clear. But apparently not entirely clear to the questioner. He pressed on. “Does anyone think Obama’s a Muslim?” he asked.
By now it was evident the questions made some guests uncomfortable. This guy was casting a pall over our good time. But he wouldn’t quit. “Anybody think Obama’s a Muslim?” he asked. And again most of those present raised their hands.
The president, they were convinced, or said they were, is indeed a Muslim who was not born in this country.
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"Across the country, enrollment by people of color in culinary schools is on the rise," MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry reported on Sunday's edition of her show. MSNBC: Minority participation in the culinary industry trending upwards.
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The profession is often thought of as upper-class and white, and as Harris-Perry noted, it largely is. 60 percent of chefs are white—9 percent are black—and culinary school can cost up to $30,000, placing a large class barrier before those who want to work in the industry.
But the demographics may be changing. For example, the Culinary Institute of America in New York has had its black enrollment double since 2004, though African Americans still make up less than 7 percent of its student body.
Syrena Johnson, an African American chef from New Orleans, appeared on the show to talk about how she became a member of the new generation of black chefs. After starting her culinary career at McDonald's, Johnson received a scholarship as part of John Besh's Chefs Move! program to attend the French Culinary Institute in New York.
"I think it's a start," she said about Besh's scholarship. "I couldn't have went as far as I did now."
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In 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers assigned more than 10,000 men to build the Alaska Canada Military Highway. About a third were black soldiers: members of three newly formed “Negro regiments” the corps accepted for the job because it had no choice, other engineering units having been dispatched to the Pacific theater. New York Times: In Road-Building, Black Soldiers Defied Prejudice.
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The black soldiers faced vicious cold, heat, mosquitoes and mud, like everyone else. But they also had to contend with relentless racism.
The Army was still segregated; black units were led by white officers. As late as 1936, a manpower assessment produced at the Army War College described black soldiers as shiftless, dishonest and lazy. “Say what you will,” the report declared, “the American Negro is still a primitive human being.”
It was a view the Army as a whole embraced. The officers in charge were usually Southerners who supposedly “understood” blacks but in fact disparaged and despised them. Senior commanders of the road-building effort, one of them the son of a Confederate general, declared that blacks (often they called them something else) might be able to wield picks and shovels, but not the heavy equipment the job required.
So when they were issued heavy equipment, black units sometimes received vehicles otherwise headed for the scrapheap. And sometimes they lost even that to white units whose equipment was delayed or damaged.
Army Corps of Engineers
1942 Cpl. Refines Sims Jr., left, and Pvt. Alfred Jalufkamet in the middle.
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Long before hip-hop bravado became a given in American pop culture, George Jefferson, played by the late Sherman Hemsley, was already making way for it. The Grio: Sherman Hemsley dead: How George Jefferson helped black America ‘move on up’.
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As television’s first “self-made” black man, George Jefferson was living the black American dream. While James and Florida Evans were “scratchin’ and surviving” on Good Times, George and his wife Weezy were thriving, “movin’ on up, to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky.”
George was the ambitious, poor kid from Harlem who didn’t roll with the punches. Instead, he gave them out. Cashing in on the bloody receipts collected during the hard fought civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s, George realized that he could parlay his street smarts into a legitimate hustle way before Jay-Z became the hustler’s ambassador and Stringer Bell from The Wire got hip to the game, albeit too late.
Like Florence, George and Weezy’s black maid, many Americans were clueless to their reality. “How come we overcame, and nobody told me?” she quipped in one of the show’s early episodes. America may have met George Jefferson as Archie Bunker’s black, bigoted counterpart who could dole out “honky” as easily as others chanted the n-word, but he proved more than that.
Settling into a middle class existence in Queens wasn’t his American dream. No, he wanted to be rich and he didn’t have to tap dance or sing to do it. He was a black entrepreneur capitalizing on the unprecedented opportunities afforded to him. Even when his wife, his rock, doubted where his ambition would lead them, he never wavered. George Jefferson proved that he didn’t have to change himself to get money. He was as much a peacock on Manhattan’s posh east side as he had been as a scrappy kid in Harlem. In the end, the almighty dollar spoke loudly and he rather preferred it to shout. According to George Jefferson, the only thing better than being rich, was being richer.
In this 1977 file photo provided by CBS, Sherman Hemsley, left, and Paul Benedict star in an episode of "The Jeffersons." Hemsley, the actor who made the irascible George Jefferson of "The Jeffersons" one of television's most memorable characters and a symbol for urban upward mobility, was found dead Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at his El Paso, Texas home. He was 74. (AP Photo/CBS, File)
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Yes they went there, and yes FOX "news" decided to air the ad. Huffington Post: Conservative Majority Fund PAC Airs Birther Campaign Ad Hitting All Obama Conspiracy Theories.
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A conservative PAC released a campaign ad this week, effectively airing a one-minute crash course for repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama's past.
The Conservative Majority Fund PAC's spot looks like a cheaply produced infomercial, except instead of selling gadgets, it's pushing the notion that Obama is hiding something dark about his past. It includes all of the boilerplate fringe theories: Questions about Bill Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, characters in the president's book, his college records, his social security number, and of course, his birth certificate, all make an appearance.
"No one -- I mean no one -- has seen an actual physical copy of Barack Obama's birth certificate," the narrator says, before directing viewers to call a number to "disqualify Obama before the Democratic National Convention." They'll need 10,000 signatures from every congressional district in the United States to do this.
The Atlantic reports that the ad was aired on Fox News on Tuesday afternoon. Some birthers were apparently not satisfied with the content, saying it improperly identified the state where the president's social security number supposedly originated.
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Why High HIV Rates in Black, Latino Gay Men? The Root: Experts suggest that there are various cultural and economic reasons for increased infection numbers.
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Last week the Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada to help prevent the spread of HIV infections. The announcement coincides with the International AIDS Conference, taking place this week in Washington, D.C., where those working in the fields of HIV prevention, health care and public policy have converged to discuss the pandemic. This is the first year since 1990 that the United States has hosted the summit, and it couldn't come at a more appropriate time.
Alarming new statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that gay males make up 2 percent of the U.S. population but 50 percent of new HIV-infection cases. While men who sleep with men are routinely a large percentage of the newly infected, recent CDC research shows that for African-American gay males between the ages of 13 and 29, the HIV-infection rate rose 48 percent between 2006 and 2009. And among Latinos, gay and bisexual men account for two-thirds of new infections.
African-American and Latino men who sleep with men are the main groups to show such large statistical averages. These figures make one wonder why these populations remain the leading infected communities -- in addition to African-American women -- 30 years after the HIV/AIDS epidemic began.
Donna McCree, the CDC's associate director of health equity in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, said that a sense of urgency about prevention measures has been lost. "Some of the young men weren't even around when there was no medication to treat HIV; that [fact] can have an impact," she explained to The Root.
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