Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
This man needs no introduction. He's an engineer, astronomer, and knowledgeable in agricultural matters. His name is Benjamin Banneker.
Benjamin Banneker was born in 1731 just outside of Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a slave. His grandfather had been a member of a royal family in Africa and was wise in agricultural endeavors. As a young man, he was allowed to enroll in a school run by Quakers and excelled in his studies, particularly in mathematics. Soon, he had progressed beyond the capabilities of his teacher and would often make up his own math problems in order to solve them.
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One day his family was introduced to a man named Josef Levi who owned a watch. Young Benjamin was so fascinated by the object that Mr. Levi gave it to him to keep, explaining how it worked. Over the course of the next few days, Benjamin repeatedly took the watch apart and then put it back together. After borrowing a book on geometry and another on Isaac Newton's Principia (laws of motion) he made plans to build a larger version of the watch, mimicking a picture he had seen of a clock. After two years of designing the clock and carving each piece by hand, including the gears, Banneker had successfully created the first clock ever built in the United States. For the next thirty years, the clock kept perfect time.
In 1776, the Third Continental Congress met and submitted the Declaration of Independence from England. Soon thereafter, the Revolutionary War broke out and Banneker set out to grow crops of wheat in order to help feed American troops. His knowledge of soil gained from his grandfather allowed him to raise crops in areas which had previously stood barren for years......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) donned a hoodie and took to the House floor this morning to speak out against the murder of Travyon Martin, but was shouted down and removed from the floor by the Republican speaker pro tem for violating House rules prohibiting the wearing of hats. ThinkProgress: Congressman Gets Kicked Off House Floor For Wearing Hoodie For Trayvon.
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As Rush spoke about the murder and racial profiling, he removed his suit jacket to reveal a grey hoodie, while saying, “just because someone wears a hoodie, [it] does not make them a hoodlum.” Rush flipped up the hood, put on a pair of sunglasses, and began reciting Bible verses, prompting Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), acting as speaker, to bang his gavel and demand that Rush stop speaking. “The member is out of order,” Harper scolded. “The member is no longer recognized.”
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More than 1,900 documents, photographs and films of South Africa's first black president available for free online. The Guardian: Nelson Mandela archive launches digital treasure trove.
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My Darlings," begins the neat blue script. "Once again our beloved Mummy has been arrested and now she and Daddy are away in jail. My heart bleeds as I think of her sitting in some police cell far away from home, perhaps alone and without anybody to talk to, and with nothing to read. Twenty four hours of the day longing for her little ones."
The letter was written from prison on 23 June 1969 by Nelson Mandela to his daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, after their mother, Winnie, had been detained by apartheid-era police. Now, in Mandela's original handwriting, complete with crossings out and corrections, it can be read for free by anyone with internet access.
The poignant missive is among more than 1,900 documents, photographs and films of South Africa's first black president that were published online on Tuesday by Google and the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.
The digital treasure trove ranges from Mandela's church membership cards from the 1920s and 30s to the warrants of committal that sent him to jail; from the earliest known photo of his cell on Robben Island to prison and presidential diaries. The multimedia website allows users to zoom in on his desk calendars where handwritten notes chronicle his daily life as an inmate – the entry for 13 December 1989 shows that he and President F W de Klerk met for the first time and talked for two and a half hours.
One of Nelson Mandela's journals from his time in Robben Island prison. Photograph: Nelson Mandela Digital Archive Project.
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Even though there are serious set backs from time to time Africa as a whole is moving towards democracy. New York Times: Across Africa, Steady Steps Toward Democracy.
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After 50 years of independence, the path to democracy does not follow an obvious, straight line in this region, just as it did not in the West — the model for most citizens here — where it was centuries in the making.
That is the most obvious lesson from the sharply contrasting experiences of two West African nations over the past week: Senegal, where power is being transferred peacefully after a fair election on Sunday, and Mali, where after two decades of relative success, democracy was snuffed out in a military coup on Thursday.
Across the region, democracy, even amid setbacks, seemed to inch forward. In Niger and in Guinea, military rulers gave up power to the people over the last 18 months, while any subsequent encroachments were vigorously resisted. In Ivory Coast, a power grab provoked a citizen uprising, later amplified by foreign firepower. In Liberia, a losing opposition candidate cried foul last fall after an election widely seen as credible, hoping that citizens would follow him, but few did. And in Nigeria, even the chaotic and bloody election of last spring is celebrated as an improvement.
What remained constant is both the aspiration and the discernment of the people. The ordinary citizens wanted a voice, and seemed to know — even in the most depressed slums of Conakry, Niamey, Bamako or Dakar — that democracy was the best way to get it.
Once glimpsed, democracy was vigorously fought for; once achieved, it was jealously guarded. African countries that had seemed immobile in relation to the Arab Spring in the Middle East were bubbling, just beneath or sometimes above the surface. Even the coup leaders in Mali felt obliged to repeat that they would soon call elections, though there was skepticism that they would do so. And Mali notwithstanding, coups are in steady decline from their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.
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As African lions outpace Asian tigers, one of the world's poorest states is moving from civil war bust to boom – but who will gain? The Guardian: Boom time for Mozambique, once the basket case of Africa.
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The shells of stylish colonial-era buildings, like shipwrecks on the ocean floor, still give Maputo a distinct character. But the capital of Mozambique no longer feels like an urban museum. Amid the crumbling grandeur rumble cranes and mechanical diggers, carving out a different skyline.
A construction boom is under way here, concrete proof of the economic revolution in Mozambique. Growth hit 7.1% last year, accelerating to 8.1% in the final quarter. The country, riven by civil war for 15 years, is poised to become the world's biggest coal exporter within the next decade, while the recent discovery of two massive gas fields in its waters has turned the region into an energy hotspot, promising a £250bn bonanza.
The national currency was the best performing in the world against the dollar. Investment is pouring in on an unprecedented scale; as if to prove that history has a sense of irony, Portuguese feeling Europe's economic pain are flocking back to the former colony, scenting better prospects than at home. Increasingly this is the rule, not the exception in Africa, which has boasted six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies in the past decade. The first oil discovery in Kenya was confirmed on Monday, while the British firm BG Group announced that one of its gas fields off the Tanzanian coast was bigger than expected and could lead to billions of pounds of investment. Bankers, analysts and politicians have never been so bullish about the continent, which barely 10 years ago was regarded as a basket case.
From Cape Town to Cairo, there are signs of a continent on the move: giant infrastructure projects, an expanding middle class, foreign equity scrambling for opportunities in telecoms, financial services and products aimed at a billion consumers. Growth is no magic bullet for reducing inequality or fostering democracy, but the stubborn truth that it is still the world's poorest continent has done little to dull the confidence and hype about the African renaissance.
As African lions outpace Asian tigers, one of the world's poorest states is moving from civil war bust to boom – but who will gain?
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Confidential documents made public on Monday show one of the nations leading anti-gay groups planned to defeat campaigns for gay marriage across the country by “fanning the hostility” between black voters and gay voters. ColorLines: Internal Papers Show Anti-Gay Marriage Group Looked to Divide Gays, Latinos and Blacks.
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The documents were made public on Monday afternoon by a federal court, as part of an ongoing case challenging the financial activities National Organization for Marriage in Maine, according to the gay rights groups Human Rights campaign, which first published the report.
The documents were marked “confidential” by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which was formed to support the passage of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008. NOM has gone on to campaign against laws recognizing same-sex families in some of the nations biggest fights, including efforts in Massachusetts, Maine and New York.
According to the internal documents NOM raised $3 million for California’s Prop. 8 campaign and was its “largest single contributor.”
“It is likely no overstatement to suggest that without NOM’s early leadership, the Prop. 8 campaign would have never gotten off the ground,” read the notes from the 2008-2009 board update.
“National Organization for Marriage Board Update 2008-2009.”
“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies,” reads an internal report on 2008 and 2009 campaigns, in a section titled the “Not A Civil Right Project.”
“Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots,” reads the document.
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Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is jumping into the voting rights fight, with his group craigconnects publishing an infographic that illustrates the surge of voting restrictions that have been enacted in states around the country in recent years. TalkingPointsMemo: Craigslist Founder Jumps Into Voting Rights Fight
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“What I learned in high school civics class is that an attack on voting rights is virtually the same as an attack on the country,” Newmark said in a statement. “So I asked people smarter than me to help me do what George Washington would have wanted me to do, collect and release the information you’re getting from us today.”
“I think all Americans should be concerned about these new voter restrictions,” Newmark said. “Voting is our fundamental right. If the states continue to restrict who can vote, who knows where they will stop?”
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Arbitron, the largest radio ratings service, has settled a lawsuit in California over how it measures minority audiences, agreeing to pay $400,000 and to abide by certain research methods in tracking black and Latino radio listeners. New York Times: Arbitron Agrees to Improve How It Counts Minority Radio Listeners
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The agreement, announced on Monday, settles a suit filed last week by the attorney general of California, who was joined by the city attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The suit contended that Arbitron undercounted minority audiences in how it recruited people to use its Portable People Meter, an electronic device that it introduced in 2008 to measure radio listening habits.
Recalling an earlier lawsuit in New York and New Jersey, the California suit asserted that Arbitron’s method of relying on landline telephones to find users of its metering devices left out many minority households and that stations serving blacks and Latinos suffered lower ratings as a result.
Arbitron agreed in the settlement to reach listeners by address and make other steps to represent minority groups. It will also pay $150,000 each to the State of California and the City of Los Angeles, and $100,000 to the City and County of San Francisco.
“This settlement ensures that California’s diverse audiences will be fully counted by Arbitron’s ratings systems and that broadcasters serving these communities will have the opportunity to compete fairly in the marketplace,” Kamala D. Harris, the California attorney general, said in a statement.
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The Front Porch is now open!
Grab a seat and get a plate! If you are new-introduce yourself and join in.
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