Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
African-American engineer and inventor Lonnie G. Johnson was born in Alabama in 1949. He earned his master's degree in nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University, and went on to work for the U.S. Air Force and the NASA space program. After tinkering with the invention of a high-powered water gun, Johnson's Super Soaker became a top-selling item by the early 1990s. He has since been developing the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter (JTEC), an engine that converts heat directly into electricity.
Lonnie George Johnson was born on October 6, 1949, in Mobile, Alabama. His father was a World War II veteran who worked as a civilian driver at nearby Air Force bases, while his mother worked in a laundry and as a nurse's aid. During the summers, both of Johnson's parents also picked cotton on his grandfather's farm.
Out of both interest and economic necessity, Johnson's father was a skilled handyman who taught his children to build their own toys. When Johnson was still a small boy, he and his dad built a pressurized chinaberry shooter out of bamboo shoots. At the age of 13, Johnson attached a lawnmower engine to a go-kart he built from junkyard scraps and raced it along the highway until the police pulled him over.
Johnson dreamed of becoming a famous inventor and, during his teenage years, began to grow more curious about the way things worked and more ambitious in his experimentation—sometimes to the detriment of his family. "Lonnie tore up his sister's baby doll to see what made the eyes close," his mother later recalled. Another time, he nearly burned the house down when he attempted to cook up rocket fuel in one of his mother's saucepans and the concoction exploded.
Growing up in Mobile in the days of legal segregation, Johnson attended Williamson High School, an all-black facility, where, despite his precocious intelligence and creativity, he was told not to aspire beyond a career as a technician. Nevertheless, inspired by the story of famed African-American inventor George Washington Carver, Johnson persevered in his dream of becoming an inventor.
Nicknamed "The Professor" by his high school buddies, Johnson represented his school at a 1968 science fair sponsored by the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS). The fair took place at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where, just five years earlier, Governor George Wallace had tried to prevent two black students from enrolling at the school by standing in the doorway of the auditorium.
The only black student in the competition, Johnson debuted a compressed-air-powered robot, called "the Linex," that he had painstakingly built from junkyard scraps over the course of a year. Much to the chagrin of the university officials, Johnson won first prize. "The only thing anybody from the university said to us during the entire competition," Johnson later recalled, "was 'Goodbye' and 'Y'all drive safe, now.'".......Read More
The actor, who gained attention as John Lewis in Selma, talked to The Root about what it was like to play another iconic figure and how he wanted to reveal the humanity of the legendary track star. The Root: Stephan James on His Breakout Role as Jesse Owens in Race.
Perhaps Toronto native Stephan James looks vaguely familiar because of his role as John Lewis in Selma. As the star of Race, the first feature film about Jesse Owens, James is sure to become a lot more recognizable. The Root caught up with James—whose young career also includes credits for The Book of Negroes; The Gabby Douglas Story; the CW series L.A. Complex; and Degrassi: The Next Generation—to talk about his breakthrough leading role.
James portrays Owens in a film that deals with the track-and-field star’s grand moment at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where he won four gold medals. James spoke about Race’s original star John Boyega, what drew him to the role of Owens, what it was like playing John Lewis and what moviegoers should get from Race.
The Root: John Boyega was originally slated to play Jesse Owens.
Stephan James: So, John was attached and he ended up doing this little movie called Star Wars. And I love John. I’m like a big fan of John’s. Would love to work with John one day. But yeah, he passed on Race, and I guess it was open to anyone at that point.
Like anyone, I got the script. I knew [Jesse Owens’] name, but I really didn’t remember what it is he had done, so I felt like I had to get refreshed. So I read the script and I realized like, wow, this is an incredible human being. I told my manager, however I had to do it, let me see the director; I got to play him.
TR: So what attracted you to Jesse Owens?
SJ: Just the type of man he was. Even more so than the athlete he was. He was somebody who exuded love, somebody who was a caring, humble person, somebody who was an honest man. He raised his daughter and married his wife at a very young age. He just decided to live his life and pursue great things despite any obstacles or fears or anything you can think of that would hold somebody back.
#BlackLivesMatter worldwide, welcome to Brazil, where deadly police violence against Afro-Brazilians is the norm. The Root: Fighting a Black ‘Genocide’ in Brazil.
For African-American tourists, Salvador is a city in Brazil where Brazilians maintain the strongest ties to Africa through music, food and religion. It’s Brazil’s blackest city. Eighty percent of the population is of African descent.
But for the Afro-Brazilians who live there, Salvador is a place where black men are constantly harassed by an intimidating police force, one that many say kills freely and with impunity. This year’s carnival in Salvador attracted more than 2 million people for six days of music and dancing in the streets. But the festive days also marked the anniversary of one of the city’s worst police killings—the “Chacina do Cabula” or, in English, the Cabula massacre.
In the early morning hours of Feb. 6, 2015, just a week before last year’s carnival, police rounded up more than 30 young black men in the neighborhood of Cabula. Police say that some had been trying to rob a bank. Others just happened to be in the area. The police lined the men along a wall with their backs away from them. In an exchange of gunfire, 12 people were killed. The victims ranged in ages from 17 to 27. Two were minors. A police officer was grazed by one bullet. A secretly taped video of the bodies in the morgue showed that three of the victims had bullet wounds in the back. Three others had bullet wounds in the chest, and another person’s head was entirely bandaged.
For local journalist Enderson Araújo, the “Chacina do Cabula” wasn’t a rare event. It showed the world what black people go through daily in the city.
“What happened was a true ethnic cleaning, a genocide against young black people,” wrote Araújo in a national Brazilian magazine. “This is a problem that young black people have encountered and fought against for a long time through various movements."
One week after the massacre, the residents organized a protest in their community. They soon began to receive threats from local police. Araújo received so many threats from police that he left Salvador for a while but has since returned.
Opposition claims of corruption and lack of progress fuel tensions in Kampala as Yoweri Museveni bids for fifth term as Ugandan president. The Guardian: Uganda goes to the polls gripped by fear of political violence.
Fear of violence hangs over the Ugandan capital Kampala as the country heads to polls on Thursday to decide whether to re-elect as president a man who has held power for 30 years.
President Yoweri Museveni faces challenges from his former personal physician Kizza Besigye and Amama Mbabazi, his former prime minister. Five others, including a female candidate, are also in contention for the presidency.
But in a country with the traumatic legacy of the Idi Amin dictatorship and the civil war that propelled Museveni to power in 1986, the concerns of many voters were encapsulated by Sophie, a 21-year-old restaurant assistant in Kampala. Told by her boss that she needed to work on Thursday, which has been declared a national holiday, she said: “Oh, you want us to be teargassed or shot?”
The buildup to the election has been punctuated by repeated calls for peace during and after polling by political, security, religious, cultural and civil society leaders, as well as media organisations.
Blacks, Latinos, and poor whites suffered because of his draconian approach to criminal punishment. Slate: The Human Toll of Antonin Scalia’s Time on the Court.
In the days since Antonin Scalia’s death, he has been duly recognized as one of the most impactful justices in the Supreme Court’s history. A critical part of his troubling legacy has long been staring us in the face, although it finally started receiving the public scrutiny it deserves in recent years. As draconian punishments became the norm over the last three decades, the Supreme Court largely rubber-stamped these practices. Justice Scalia played a key role in this process, as his hardline stances on criminal punishment significantly contributed to mass incarceration, numerous executions, and systemic racial discrimination. Scalia was an outspoken supporter of harsh punishments and wanted the court to take an even more hands-off attitude toward so-called “tough on crime” laws.
Not long after he made it onto the court in 1986, Scalia’s influence on these issues began to be felt. In McCleskey v. Kemp, one of the first cases he heard, anti-death penalty advocates brought compelling evidence of pervasive racial discrimination in Georgia’s administration of capital punishment. A sophisticated statistical study demonstrated that sentencing was tied to the race of the victim and offender. All other factors being equal, blacks who killed whites were the likeliest to receive a death sentence. Justice Scalia was unfazed. During oral arguments, he derisivelyasked: “What if you do a statistical study that shows beyond question that people who are naturally shifty-eyed are to a disproportionate extent convicted in criminal cases, does that make the criminal process unlawful?”
John Charles Boger, who represented the black death-row prisoner in McCleskey, responded by pointing to the obvious: “This is not some sort of statistical fluke or aberration. We have a century-old pattern in the state of Georgia of animosity [toward black-Americans].” Scalia and four other justices nonetheless chose to analyze discrimination out of its social context, including in cases from Southern states with a lengthy history of slavery, segregation, and lynchings.
Scalia was in the majority as the court held that statistical proof of systemic discrimination in the death penalty is irrelevant. A defendant must instead prove intentional discrimination in his own case, an almost impossible standard without considering systemic patterns. Many experts consider McCleskey among the worst Supreme Court decisions of all-time. It largely closed the door to statistical evidence as a means of challenging systemic discrimination in criminal punishment.
On the prospectus for $7 billion of Intel bonds issued in July 2015, the top billing was unsurprising: the banking powerhouses Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Then, in small print, came two lesser-known underwriting firms: Lebenthal & Co. and Williams Capital Group. Not exactly titans of Wall Street. So what were they doing there?
The answer has something to do with the push for diversity in Silicon Valley. U.S. technology companies are making a point of giving a piece of the underwriting action—long dominated by mostly male, mostly white companies—to firms owned by women and minorities. The name Lebenthal, for years synonymous with municipal bonds, disappeared from Wall Street more than a decade ago. Then Alexandra Lebenthal, the family scion, reconstituted the 90-year-old business and positioned it as a top women-owned underwriter. Christopher Williams, a former Lehman Brothers and Jefferies Group investment banker, founded Williams Capital in 1994 and built it into one of the largest minority-owned underwriters.
Intel says it is “stepping up efforts” to work with minority- and women-owned financial firms, according to its website. Apple turned to minority- and women-owned underwriters for the first time last year.
“What we used to think of as minority groups are starting to feel their own economic power,” says Ronald Hill, a professor of marketing and business law at Villanova School of Business. “If you’re looking at growth, ignoring that puts you behind.” Others, however, see the Silicon Valley move mainly as public relations: Allocating a tiny fraction of deals to the firms costs corporations next to nothing. “It’s entirely cosmetic,” says Roy Smith, a professor of finance at New York University and a former partner at Goldman Sachs. “It’s a sign of good behavior.”
Executives at women- and minority-owned firms say they earn their fees by placing securities with investors the big boys often overlook. They also say getting business is fiercely competitive. “Nobody’s just handing out money,” says David Jones, co-founder of CastleOak Securities, a black-owned firm in New York. “Maybe we get a look because we’re a minority firm, but you don’t get repeat business.”
Jones has been expanding his fixed-income sales and trading team, but he has no illusions about where CastleOak stands in the pecking order. “You can’t say we’re going to be the next Goldman Sachs,” he says.
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