Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
George Edward Alcorn, Jr. (March 22, 1940) was born on March 22, 1940, to George and Arletta Dixon Alcorn. His father was an auto mechanic who sacrificed so Alcorn and his brother could get an education. Alcorn attended Occidental College in Pasadena, California, where he maintained an excellent academic record while earning eight letters in baseball and football. Alcorn graduated with a B.A. in physics in 1962, and in 1963 he completed a master's degree in nuclear physics from Howard University. During the summers of 1962 and 1963, Alcorn worked as a research engineer for the Space Division of North American Rockwell, computing trajectories and orbital mechanics for missiles. A NASA grant supported Alcorn's research on negative ion formation during the summers of 1965 and 1966. In 1967 he earned his doctorate from Howard University in atomic and molecular physics.
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After earning his Ph.D., Alcorn spent twelve years in industry. He was senior scientist at Philco-Ford, senior physicist at Perker-Elmer, and advisory engineer at IBM Corporation. In 1973, Alcorn was chosen to be IBM Visiting Professor in Electrical Engineering at Howard University, and he has held positions at that university ever since, rising to the rank of full professor. Alcorn is also a full professor in the department of electrical engineering at the University of the District of Columbia, where he has taught courses ranging from advanced engineering mathematics to microelectronics.
Alcorn left IBM, where he worked as a Second Plateau Inventor, to join NASA in 1978. While at NASA, Alcorn invented an imaging x-ray spectrometer using thermomigration of aluminum, for which he earned a patent in 1984, and two years later he devised an improved method of fabrication using laser drilling. His work on imaging x-ray spectrometers earned him the 1984 NASA/GSFC Inventor of the Year Award. During this period he also served as deputy project manager for advanced development, and in this position he was responsible for developing new technologies required for the space station Freedom. Alcorn served as manager for advanced programs at NASA/GSFC from 1990 to 1992, and his primary duties concerned the managing of technology programs and evaluating technologies which were required by GSFC. He also managed the GSFC Evolution Program, concerned with ensuring that over its 30-year mission the space station develops properly while incorporating new capabilities.
Since 1992, Alcorn has served as chief of Goddard's Office of Commercial Programs supervising programs for technology transfer, small business innovation research, and the commercial use of space programs. He managed a shuttle flight experiment that involved Robot Operated Material Processing System, or ROMPs, in 1994. The experiment involved the manufacture of materials in the microgravity of space.
In 1999 Alcorn was awarded Government Executive Magazine's prestigious--- Government Technology Leadership Award (there were only two awards in all of NASA's ten centers that year) for the development and commercialization of -- THE AIRBORNE LIDAR TOPOGRAPHICAL MAPPING SYSTEM (ALTMS ) . In 2001 Dr Alcorn was awarded special congressional recognition by Congresswoman Donna M. Christian-Christensen (D-VI) for his efforts in helping Virgin Islands businesses through application of NASA technology and knowledge of technology programs.....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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It's not just the collection plate that's getting passed around this fall at hundreds of mainly African-American and Latino churches in presidential battleground states and across the nation. NPR: Churches Using 'Souls To Polls' To Rally Vote.
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Exhorting congregations to register to vote, church leaders are distributing registration cards in the middle of services, and many are pledging caravans of "souls to the polls" to deliver the vote.
The stepped-up effort in many states is a response by activists worried that new election rules, from tougher photo identification requirements to fewer days of early voting, are unfairly targeting minority voters — specifically, African-Americans who tend to vote heavily for Democrats. Some leaders compare their registration and get-out-the-vote efforts to the racial struggle that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
"In light of all this, we are saying just let our people vote," said the Rev. Dawn Riley Duval, social justice minister at the Shorter Community A.M.E. Church in Denver. "The people are being oppressed by these measures. It has ignited a sense of urgency and collective power that we can take by engaging in the process."
In key swing states such as Florida and Ohio, proponents of the new election rules deny they are aimed at suppressing the minority vote in hopes of helping Republicans win more races. Reasons for their enactment vary between rooting out fraud and purging ineligible voters to streamlining the voting process.
But to some African-American leaders like the Rev. F.E. Perry, a Cleveland-based bishop in Ohio's Church of God in Christ, it's as if the 1960s barriers to black civil rights have returned all over again.
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When Minnesota voters head to the polls this November, they’ll decide on whether to amend their state’s constitution to “require all voters to present valid photo identification to vote,” and to mandate the state issue free ID to eligible voters beginning in July of 2013. ColorLines: Minnesota Voters Raise Their Diverse Voices for Voting Rights.
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Minnesota-based Organizing Apprenticeship Project (OAP) launched its “Voices for Voting Rights” video series, a campaign that uses narratives and storytelling to engage communities of color in opposition to the Voter ID amendment. Jointly produced by Line Break Media, the series of five videos target five Minnesota communities: Latino, Somali, African American, Native American, and Hmong.
The videos are part of the OAP’s ongoing training and policy research aimed to reframe the discourse around Voter ID.
“What was important to us was to be able to […] have each video both come from and speak to each community,” said Vina Kay, OAP Director of Research and Policy. “We want it to belong to the community. We wanted the people to be comfortable in how they were communicating their story.”
The first video, released September 24, features Latino community members, including a religious leader and community organizers. “Voter ID would be one more systematic blow,” says Deacon Carl Valdez of Incarnation Catholic Church/Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. “The average citizen does not know that many people do not have the same conveniences, especially those who are poor, those of a different race, those who do not have the same opportunities that many people have.”
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South Africa's Jacob Zuma fancies a bigger role for the continent on the Security Council. Will he get his wish? The Root: Africa Wants Entry to UN Halls of Power.
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South African President Jacob Zuma made a rousing speech last week at the United Nations, invoking Nelson Mandela and praising the virtues of inclusion, democracy and equal representation.
He argued for Africa to be admitted to the United Nations' most powerful body, the U.N. Security Council. In an argument that not so subtly referenced the evils of apartheid -- he led by thanking the U.N. for condemning apartheid and quoting the country's iconic freedom fighter -- he called for four new seats for African nations.
That includes two permanent seats, letting continental states into the elite five-member club occupied by the traditional post-World War II powers: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., all of which have veto power. He also called for Africa to be given five nonpermanent seats, up from its current three. Zuma also seemed to imply that if Africa had a seat on the council, it would be better attuned to Africa's issues and interests.
"Given its mandate, the council has to be legitimate, democratic and transparent," he told the assembled heads of state, who included U.S. President Obama. "Its current composition has a propensity for deadlock and paralysis even in the face of crisis. It remains unrepresentative and undemocratic in both its composition and decision making."
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Another Case Study in How Black Exploitation Fuels Wealth. ColorLines: On Sapelo Island.
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President Barack Obama gave an important speech this past Tuesday on the “modern day slavery” of human trafficking. On the very next day, The New York Times ran an article on the injustice looming over direct descendants of slaves here in the United States. Those descendants—the Geechee of Sapelo Island, Georgia—stand to lose their once “invaluable” land for the same reason that most traditional black and brown cultures have: someone else has noticed that a profit can be made by taking it.
The Sapelo Island dispossession is the latest example of the way in which our economy creates and thrives off of inequity. It comes during a year in which the systemic separation of people of color from their land, both in the United States and around the world, has reached a fever pitch. These larger issues require massive action by national governments and official international organizations.
However there might be an important opportunity for wealthy individuals and dedicated NGOs to save a distinct black culture in our own backyard that needs our help to survive. People of color and the organizations focused on them should be high on the list to get involved. The creation of a land trust for the people of Sapelo Island, given their history, might be the right thing at exactly the right time.
The Geechee or Gullah (the designation depends on geography, language or usage) are a unique set of African-based cultures scattered along the outer island coast from North Carolina to Florida. Their forebears were brought to the United States from rice producing civilizations along the West African coast. Residents in communities that stretched from present day Sierra Leone to Benin were targeted by slavers for their special economic skills. Colonists in the Americas needed West African agricultural prowess to turn a profit in the new terrain, which was similar to that Africans had made productive more than a thousand years before.
The economic know-how of Geechee ancestors transformed the Sea Islands into one of the wealthiest areas in the United States. Before the Mississippi Valley was taken from Native peoples and transformed into a slave-economy of cotton, sea island plantations were some of the most productive in the country. In the early 19th century, the Sea Islands were the Saudi Arabia of the American South. In due course, the Civil War arrived on the coast and destroyed an economic way of life based on stolen land and bonded labor.
The Geechees, through several turns of history, eventually took possession of the land that they had worked since before the Declaration of Independence. In economic hardship and isolation, the Geechees preserved their unique culture, language, and spiritual beliefs. But since the 1950s that way of life has come under increasing pressure from the broader society that had first used and then abandoned them. Land that was once overlooked became desirable again.
An islander recalls her mother working as a slave on a plantation, Sapelo Island, Georgia. Photo: James L. Stanfield/National Geographic/Getty Images
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A Tech Innovation in Detroit. ColorLines: Connect People, Not Computers.
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At first glance, Dolores Leonard’s house looks like all the others on her block in Southwestern Detroit. It’s a modest, one-story brick structure that sits behind a carefully manicured lawn, a place that Leonard and her husband have called home for over 50 years. What stands out is what’s on the chimney: a slim, silver pole that’s shaped almost like a spear. It stands at about 3-feet tall, sticks directly up into the air and, if all goes according to plan, will become an instrumental part of one community’s effort to build its own people-powered wireless Internet.
The device is a router, and it’s not too different than the one you’re likely using to read this story online. Once it’s up and running, the idea is that the router atop Leonard’s roof will work as a hub in what’s called a “mesh network,” to open up Internet access throughout Leonard’s working class black neighborhood.
Leonard isn’t your typical tech guru. Well into her 70s, she’s a retired adult education teacher who spends her days absorbed in her community’s issues. But the router on her roof is one sign of how important she is to the city’s emerging technological infrastructure. It’s part of an effort to build a community-owned wireless network in a neighborhood known by its zip code, 48217, one of the Detroit’s most economically impoverished areas.
The goal isn’t only to give residents a low-cost Internet option—although that’s an enticing selling point for many. It’s to give residents who are often overlooked and underserved an easy tool for gathering and spreading the information that’s important to them. “It’s important that you not be left out of the loop,” Leonard sums up.
Detroit, which is famously associated with the collapse of U.S. manufacturing, may seem like an unlikely home for a tech revolution. But it’s happening, thanks in large part to millions of dollars in federal stimulus money that’s helping make the city a hub for innovation. Both corporations and community-driven efforts are angling for space in the quickly evolving landscape.
Last April social media giant Twitter opened up offices in the city’s downtown, with one official from the San Francisco-based company telling the Huffington Post that “Detroit’s emerging mix of automotive and digital cultures made it a natural location for Twitter’s newest offices.” The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office also opened up a new space in the city, creating an important regional pathway for would-be entrepreneurs. And Black Enterprise described the flurry of activity as a “digital renaissance.”
From left to right: Rhonda Anderson and Delores Leonard. Photo: Jamliah King
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