Commentary: Black Scientist and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Rufus Stokes (September 3, 1922 - June 22, 1986), an American inventor, was born in Phenix City, Alabama.
Rufus Stokes grew up in the rural South and attended public school in Alabama until he was 18 years old. On November 5, 1940, just before receiving his high school diploma, Rufus Stokes enlisted in the US Army at Fort Benning, Georgia in the Quartermaster Corps. In the Army, he attended a technical school where he received auto mechanic training. He was deployed in western Europe and served predominantly in the Rhineland campaign. Upon his discharge, he was decorated with an American Defense Service Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and Good Conduct Medal.
While leaving the military, Stokes met Bessie Lee Knight,his future wife, of Camp Hill, Alabama when she was attending Tuskegee Institute. Army records indicate that he was married at the time of his discharge in 1945. Soon after, they moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where Stokes was employed as a part-time auto mechanic. In 1947, they moved once again, to Waukegan, Illinois where he found temporary employment as a pipe and sheet metal worker. Between late 1947 and 1949, Stokes was employed as an orderly at the Chicago Veterans Administration Hospital, specifically in the Tuberculosis Sanitarium. It was during this time that he first saw the negative health effects of the city's pollution. In 1949, he left the hospital and found work at Brule Inc., an incinerator manufacturing company in Chicago. He quickly learned the process of combustion and was thought to contribute heavily in the designs of new incinerators, but was never credited for his work. For that reason, he left to pursue his own interests....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Examining one of the most important events in black American history New York Times: A Writer’s Long Journey to Trace the Great Migration.
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To finish "The Warmth of Other Suns," her magisterial new history of the black migration in America, which carried millions of Southerners northward or westward, Isabel Wilkerson had to complete a sort of reverse migration. She began writing the book in Chicago, where she was the bureau chief for The New York Times, and finished it more than a decade later in a house in the Virginia Highland neighborhood of Atlanta. Ms. Wilkerson moved here in 2001, for reasons unconnected to the book, and immediately discovered, she said this week, that she "needed to be here, only I didn’t know it."
"I needed to look through the exile’s heart and feel that distant, rejecting, hurtful feeling," she added. "I needed to come here to see what they left."
Though she had never grown anything before, she planted an elaborate garden and began collecting art from the 1940s: portraits of now mostly anonymous black people. On a shelf next to the Pulitzer Prize that Ms. Wilkerson won in 1994 for feature writing for The Times, she keeps the Corona typewriter that belonged to her grandfather, Charles Richardson. An elevator operator in Rome, Ga., he dreamed of becoming a writer, though at the time he wasn’t allowed to walk through the door of the local newspaper. "He wrote reams and reams of what was probably a memoir that no one took seriously," Ms. Wilkerson said. "I wish we had paid more attention."
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Are blacks less islamaphobic? Recent data about how black and white Americans view the New York City mosque controversy suggest that this is true, but opinions vary as to why. The Root: Is There Less Anti-Islamic Sentiment Among Blacks?
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Most recently, national anger at Islam has manifested itself as a fevered culture war taking place around plans for the Cordoba House Islamic Center near Ground Zero in Manhattan. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Cordoba House, with just 34 percent approving. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who most object to the community center are more likely to be Republican, older and less educated. They're also more likely to be white.
Despite having a largely Christian populace that is much less educated than whites overall, the black community actually supports the Cordoba House at rates outstripping the white community's by double digits. While 58 percent of whites "agreed with those who object to the center," just 40 percent of blacks did the same. What's more, while only 29 percent of whites agreed that Cordoba House should be built, regardless of the controversy, 47 percent of blacks believed it should. Researchers cautioned that just 92 blacks were among Pew's sample of more than 1,000, but they also said that the differences between blacks and whites on the Islamic-center issue were large enough to be considered significant.
That in mind, the next question is why the African-American community -- which contains a multitude of viewpoints like any other -- is so much more willing than the white community to support the world's second-largest religion?
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Nigeria will hold its next presidential election on 22 January 2011, officials have announced. BBC: Nigeria sets presidential election date
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The ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) will now have to decide whether to allow President Goodluck Jonathan to run as their candidate. Mr Jonathan came to power after the death of President Umaru Yar'Adua.
But his candidacy would break the PDP's unwritten practice of alternating power between politicians from the north and south of the country.
Northerner Mr Yar'Adua died less than half-way through his first term in office, but the PDP favours giving two terms to each region, and Mr Jonathan hails from the south.
The party believes alternating the presidency helps to soothe the simmering tensions between rival ethnic and religious communities.
Last month, the PDP appeared to be giving ground on the issue by saying in a statement that Mr Jonathan "has the right to contest the presidential primaries".
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After Seeta and I made fun of Foursquare on Facebook my nephew clued me into this story. Atlanta Post: Square Biz: The Silicon Valley Hustle of Tristan Walker, VP of Biz Dev at FourSquare
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If you haven’t heard about mobile social startup FourSquare, then you must not be paying attention to the news, your TV or your local Starbucks. A location-based application for your phone, FourSquare is seen as the frontrunner among the crop of location-based services vying for your attention. In charge of business development over at FourSquare is Queens-bred Tristan Walker, a recent graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and former Wall Street oil trader turned tech shot-caller. Walker leads FourSquare’s partnership development with media, brands and retailers such as MTV, Bravo, American Eagle, CNN, The New York Times, Louis Vuitton, and VH1.
Walker talked with The Atlanta Post about what it’s like juggling a full-time exec-level position at a hot startup while simultaneously finishing up his MBA at one of the leading business programs in the country. Find out how he landed this position, how he became interested in the Silicon Valley hustle, and what he thinks about diversity in technology.
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Apparently, the votes of white farmers in a key state trump the USDA's settlement of long-standing discrimination complaints -- especially in an election year. The Root: $1.5 Billion for Wealthy Arkansas Farmers; Nothing for Black Farmers
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This summer the Obama White House promised Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche L. Lincoln that farmers in her state would receive $1.5 billion, ostensibly for disaster-relief aid. Cynics, however, say the money is a payoff to the farmers along with their relatives, friends and other Arkansans to get them to vote for Lincoln in November.
An Associated Press article reported that major newspaper editorials have castigated the deal, saying that the plan will bypass congressional approval and benefit wealthy farmers. A Washington Post editorial, mentioned in the AP article, declared, "If you think this looks like a back-door plan to almost double almost everyone's subsidy, we agree with you."
Lincoln is currently trailing her GOP challenger, Rep. John Boozman, in the polls, and Obama needs every friendly U.S. Senate vote he can muster. The similarity in dollar amounts that black farmers are owed, and the amount Lincoln would like to receive, is striking. The NBFA's Boyd wonders how White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel can promise that the administration will figure out how to fund the money without congressional participation.
The Congressional Black Caucus has addressed the issue of the Arkansas farmers' potential payments. In July, the CBC wrote to President Obama requesting that he and the Congressional leadership identify how to fund settlements for black farmers. The letter stated that, "The current hardships experienced by other farmers should not trump hardships placed on African Africans" by the Department of Agriculture in the past.
Jerry Pennick, director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, says that the White House has been working behind the scenes to assist the passage of the funding in the Senate, and the president supports the legislation. This past Thursday, Ben Becker -- press secretary for the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, of which Lincoln is chair -- said that Lincoln and the administration were still working out the details regarding the disposition of the $1.5 billion.
According to the NBFA, its members operate much smaller properties than white farmers do and are treated differently. The organization's average member farms 50 acres, while the average white Midwestern farmer has 1,000 acres. When agricultural subsidies are provided to the black farmer, he gets an average of $200; large white-owned farms receive $1 million.
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The economy hasn't been kind to organized labor -- especially black organized labor. Why it's poised for a comeback. The Root: Black Labor's Laborious Road Ahead
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Notwithstanding Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's late-summer paean to a phantom economic recovery (does he have imaginary playmates as well?), this Labor Day will be the bleakest for America's workers since the nadir of the Great Depression in 1932.
Back then, the unemployment rate was closing in on 25 percent. Foreclosures were up, morale down, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt wouldn't be sworn in for almost another six months. Not that it seemed to matter all that much at the time. It was hardly a foregone conclusion that Roosevelt would lay the foundation for a modern industrial state, and what's more, workers didn't appear to have enough muscle to exert any real political pressure on the incoming administration. After more than a decade of aggressive union busting by big business, the number of workers belonging to unions had been shorn almost in half in the post World War I period, from 5 million in 1920 to 2.85 million in 1933.
As it turned out, organized labor had 'em right where they wanted.
Over the next 15 years, the nation's trade unionists in general -- and the integrated Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in particular -- created the American middle class, transforming awful jobs in the packinghouses, auto factories, mines and mills into good jobs. With African Americans in the vanguard, trade unions pressured Roosevelt and Congress to pass the 1935 Wagner Act, giving employees the green light to organize. It enabled them to coax better pay, benefits and working conditions from employers and prodded the stodgy, conservative and mostly white union leadership to expand its sphere of influence beyond the shop floor.
Between 1935 and 1985, the number of blacks in labor unions skyrocketed from 50,000 to 3 million. In 1940s Chicago, an African-American stockyard worker named Charles Hayes led a faction of white, black and Asian workers who challenged and ultimately replaced the all-white leadership of the meatpackers' union, and in the years that followed, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union supported Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott; helped bankroll the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's voter registration drives in the Deep South; and raised funds, staffed phone banks and helped get out the vote for Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington. Washington responded by recognizing, for the first time, city workers' collective bargaining rights. (When he took office, nearly one in three union members was African American.)
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Impossibility of Categorization might be the first theme of the American Epic. By turns, the Hero might be the Rugged Individual traversing mountain and stream, or the stout but tender Matriarch helping bridge the decreasing gulf between the Wilderness and the Town. The Hero might at once be anti-heroic, then by actions and deeds, raised to the Heroic, then by another set of actions and deeds, once again to fall utterly; while retaining the mantle of Hero still.
As the National Myth though, the Epic functions as a device to define the members of that nation; and by what marks they were to be identified.
For the American Epic she set out to construct, Phillis Wheatley could see no method for determining who was a member of the culture and who was an other; indeed, the two positions expatiate each other constantly and indefinitely. Wheatley's subversive refusal to accept the taxonomies of a culture that marked her as the other shows Wheatley's own assimilation; she would not and could not place herself outside the narratives she recites. Her construct of the American Epic and its narratives of belonging required her participation in the culture, even if it wasn't the culture her masters constructed. For Wheatley, all Colonial Americans were equal; precisely because definitions of equivalency or difference cannot be established.
Wheatley's investigation of the dominant notions of who belongs, within the boundaries of what it is to be American, is particularly evident in her poem, To The Right Honourable William, Earl Of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary Of The State For North-America. She makes explicit her African marginality, while issuing correctives to her audience; important, because writs issued to the good Earl were also made public for all the colonies to read.
Writing before the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of a Constitution which permitted slavery, Wheatley offered a vision of an American Culture without a privileged center and without qualifications for membership based on race, class or gender. Indeed, Wheatley is the archetype American, a type which paradoxically marks itself as belonging, through a constant process of making and unmaking; of repeating and then differing from itself.
She wrote of this so long ago; we may get there still.
To The Right Honourable William, Earl Of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary Of The State For North-America
HAIL, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
The northern clime beneath her genial ray,
Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:
Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,
Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,
While in thine hand with pleasure we behold
The silken reins, and Freedom's charms unfold.
Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies
She shines supreme, while hated faction dies:
Soon as appear'd the Goddess long desir'd,
Sick at the view, she languish'd and expir'd;
Thus from the splendors of the morning light
The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land.
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,
And thee we ask thy favours to renew,
Since in thy pow'r, as in thy will before,
To sooth the griefs, which thou did'st once deplore.
May heav'nly grace the sacred sanction give
To all thy works, and thou for ever live
Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame,
Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name,
But to conduct to heav'ns refulgent fane,
May fiery coursers sweep th' ethereal plain,
And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,
Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God
-- Phillis Wheatley
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