Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Samuel Massie Jr. (1919-2005) overcame racial barriers to become one of America’s greatest chemists in research and teaching. As a doctoral candidate during World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project with Henry Gilman at Iowa State University in the development of uranium isotopes for the atomic bomb. In 1966, the U.S. Naval Academy appointed him as its first black faculty member. Massie’s research over fifty years led to the development of drugs to treat mental illness, malaria, meningitis, gonorrhea, herpes, and cancer. Chemical and Engineering News in 1998 named him one of the top seventy-five chemists of all time, along with Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, George Washington Carver, and DNA pioneers James Watson and Francis Crick.
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Samuel Massie was born on July 3, 1919, to school teachers Samuel Proctor and Earlee Jacko Massie of North Little Rock (Pulaski County). He had one younger brother. He quickly advanced to high school and graduated second in his class from Dunbar High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County) by age thirteen. Early on, he wanted to be a chemist to find a cure for his father’s asthma.
After working for a year at Horton’s Grocery Store across the street from his home in North Little Rock, Massie had saved enough to afford tuition of $15 per semester at Dunbar Junior College. A year later, in 1934, the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) turned down his application for admission because he was black. He enrolled at Arkansas AM&N (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff); earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a minor in mathematics in 1937; and, with the aid of a federal National Youth Administration scholarship, finished a master’s degree in chemistry in 1940 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught a year at Arkansas AM&N before gaining admission to a doctorate program in chemistry at Iowa State University.
Racial discrimination did not make Massie’s life any easier in Iowa. The closest housing available for African Americans was three miles from campus, requiring him to hitchhike to classes. He noted that he was assigned to a separate lab space “next to the rats in the basement” until he proved himself.
But he almost did not get to complete his doctoral program. Massie returned to Arkansas in 1943 to attend his father’s funeral and to renew his draft deferment. According to his autobiography, a member of the draft board in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) decided that he had too much education for a black man and would be drafted. Massie quickly contacted Dr. Gilman, who assigned him to his research team working on the atomic bomb. In 1946, Massie received his PhD in organic chemistry.....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Hawks owner Bruce Levenson’s email reveals how Atlanta’s sports franchises think about race. Slate: We Love Our (White) Fans.
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But it’s not as if Levenson is a unique figure in Atlanta sports. This message that the Hawks owner apologized for delivering—that white fans are more valuable than black ones—is the exact one the Atlanta Braves have been broadcasting for the last several years.
Major League Baseball’s Braves, like the Hawks, play in a stadium downtown. That won’t be the case for that much longer. In 2017, the team is moving to a new stadium in suburban, mostly white Cobb County. The deal for that facility was struck largely in secret. “If it had gotten out, more people would have started taking the position of, ‘We don't want that to happen,’ ” Braves president John Schuerholz explained.
Why wouldn’t some people want this stadium deal to happen? First, it’s being paid for in part by $400 million in public funding from Cobb County—an outlay that, to his credit, Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed did not want to match. Second, the new ballpark will be inaccessible by rail, meaning it will be isolated from a huge swath of the city’s residents. It’s no accident that fans who live in Atlanta proper will have to get to the Cobb County stadium via choked highways, the same ones that enabled the city’s white flight back in the 1960s and 1970s. With regard to transportation, Cobb County GOP chairman Joe Dendy said last year that it “is absolutely necessary the solution is all about moving cars in and around Cobb and surrounding counties from our north and east where most Braves fans travel from, and not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta.”
Braves executives have said the club’s current park, Turner Field (which was built for the 1996 Olympics), is broken down and outdated. Its location in an urban neighborhood—one that is often described as dangerous—also “doesn’t match up with where the majority of our fans come from,” according to the team’s vice president of business operations. While the franchise has supported that assertion with a heat map of season ticket holders, one that shows that Atlanta’s northern suburbs are teeming with Braves fans, it’s also not hard to spot the racial coding here. Unlike the Hawks, the Braves don’t seem troubled by the presence of black fans—they just don’t seem to care all that much about them. Rather, the team wants to focus on catering to its white, suburban clientele, and isn’t concerned about alienating its smaller black fan base.
By contrast, Hawks owner Bruce Levenson seemed to acknowledge that his team—with its larger core of black fans—should try to maximize its cross-racial appeal. In his email, he blames whites for their supposed discomfort with sitting alongside black people in an arena that’s situated in a black neighborhood. “On fan sites I would read comments about how dangerous it is around Philips [Arena],” Levenson wrote, “yet in our nine years, I don’t know of a mugging or even a pick pocket incident. This was just racist garbage. When I hear some people saying the arena is in the wrong place I think it is code for there are too many blacks at the games.”
Judging by what he wrote in 2012, Levenson wouldn’t want to bring the Hawks to the suburbs. Instead of moving away from black fans, he wanted to lure in white ones. His suggested strategy for accomplishing this, as Deadspin's Albert Burneko puts it, is to make “the in-arena experience friendlier to racists” by doing things like hiring more white cheerleaders, showing fewer black customers on the kiss cam, and playing music that’s “familiar to a 40-year-old white guy.”
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If you’re wondering why black stories aren’t told, look no further than the classrooms where writers and publishers are made. The Root: If We Want Diverse Books, We Need Diverse MFA Programs.
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Recently, in the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz described his experience in his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program: His first year, he almost dropped out because it “was too white.”
States Diaz: “I was a person of color in a workshop whose theory of reality did not include my most fundamental experience as a person of color.”
Diaz’s experience is not unusual. A decade ago, in my incoming class of the graduate program in fiction writing at New York University, there were three women of African descent—one from Ethiopia, one from the American South and myself, from Uganda. There were also two men of African descent—one biracial Jewish man and one from the American West. An Asian-American student rounded out the diversity.
In grad school, we five of African descent were lucky. But it still was not enough. The way the MFA-fiction program worked, even though there were five of us that year, we were sprinkled, one each, throughout the five workshops to create diversity for the other nonblack students. So I actually was never in a classroom setting with another black writer. Instead, in this world of fiction writing anchored in whiteness and absent of black characters, I had to defend my identity both on and off the page.
Why does this lack of diversity matter? Stories are how we see ourselves. Stories are representation. Stories are how we shape meaning. They are the legacy of our culture, determining which conversations are given voice and which people are valued.
As black people, our writing draws from our lives and cultural experiences, things like the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride and Mike Brown; civil rights and slavery; revolutions and genocides in the various African countries we hail from—things often termed “too political” by the white establishment and ill-liked in workshop, and later passed over at book auction. Samantha Chang recalls being told by the director of her program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop not to write Asian-American characters if she wanted to be a success. Diaz writes that his workshop at Cornell had “an almost lunatical belief that race was no longer a major social force,” and was never to be talked about “except on the rare occasion someone wanted to argue that ‘race discussions’ were exactly the discussion a serious writer should not be having.”
But for a lot of us writers of color, the impetus to become writers was because of racial injustice, and this was paramount in our work.
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THINKSTOCK
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Haitian and non-Haitian Caribbean culture will be the focus of two back-to-back events this weekend in Little Haiti. Miami Herald:
Little Haiti book fair to showcase Haitian culture, authors.
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South Florida residents are invited to come learn about Haitian and Caribbean art and history with two free events this weekend showcasing Miami’s Haitian culture.
Renown Haitian-American writer and Miami resident Edwidge Danticat and Haiti-based novelist Gary Victor will be among those in attendance [September 12th] at the Little Haiti Cultural Center, 260 NE 59th Terr. The event, also featuring singers and a Haitian folkloric choir, will kick off Sunday’s free street Haitian-Caribbean Book Fair.
Jan Mapou, the owner of Libreri Mapou, the preeminent book store for Haitian books, is cosponsor of a book fair to promote Haitian authors. C.W. GRIFFIN / MIAMI HERALD FILE
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A domestic violence win for disproportionately black female tenants in Pennsylvania. Patriot-News: Pa. town pays $495K to battered woman over law that punished domestic violence victims.
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A landlord friendly ordinance is costing Norristown, Pa., some $495,000 because of the unintended consequence of the ordinance – it punished domestic violence victims who phoned police for help.
In a news post on its website, the American Civil Liberties Union announced that the city of Norristown voted to repeal the municipal ordinance that "punished innocent tenants and their landlords for requesting police assistance" as part of a legal settlement.
In addition, Norristown will pay $495,000 to resident Lakisha Briggs, who faced eviction from her home after requesting police protection from an abusive ex-boyfriend, the ACLU said.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and the law firm of Pepper Hamilton LLP, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the ordinance last year on behalf of Briggs.
The plaintiffs contended that the ordinance encouraged landlords to evict tenants when police are called to a property three times in four months for "disorderly behavior," including for incidents of domestic violence.
Indeed, Briggs was threatened with eviction under this policy after the police responded to her home and arrested her abusive ex-boyfriend for physically assaulting her, the ACLU said.
In fear of losing her home, Briggs did not call the police for future incidents, including one in which her ex-boyfriend attacked her with a brick, the ACLU noted in its release.
And when neighbors called the police after her ex-boyfriend stabbed her in the neck with broken glass and she was airlifted to the hospital in June 2012, the city threatened her with forcible removal from her home under the ordinance, the ACLU wrote.
Norristown will pay $495,000 to resident Lakisha Briggs, who faced eviction from her home after requesting police protection from an abusive ex-boyfriend, the ACLU said. (submitted photo/ACLU )
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The depravity that Georgia Democrats will sink to, knows no bounds! Registering minorities? Isn’t that tantamount to voter fraud? Talking Point Memo: Top GA Election Official Warns Dems Are Registering 'All These Minority Voters' (AUDIO).
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Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R) warned that Democrats were registering minority voters and that needed to be matched by Republicans during a speech to Gwinnett Republicans in July.
Audio of Kemp's comments were flagged by the Democratic-leaning group Better Georgia and reported by ThinkProgress and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"In closing I just wanted to tell you, real quick, after we get through this runoff, you know the Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November," Kemp said in his speech. "But we've got to do the exact same thing. I would encourage all of you, if you have an Android or an Apple device, to download that app, and maybe your goal is to register one new Republican voter."
In the same speech Kemp also mentioned ACORN.
"Everybody remembers ACORN right? When ACORN was out registering people to vote they were filling out applications, they were sending out stuff and you don't know who those people are, where they're from, the people they're registering, and the people that are filling those out," Kemp said earlier in the speech. Kemp went on to tout online voter registration which, he said, reduces a number of voter fraud loopholes.
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Sadly it's also known as the "Golden Curse"... How Africa’s riches have brought it mainly misery. Economist: The unlucky continent.
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“DO NOT talk to me of gold…[it] brings more dissension, misfortune and unexpected plagues in its trails than benefits.” So said Paul Kruger, president of the small Boer republic of the Transvaal in 1885 when he was told that gold had been found on the country’s eastern border. Kruger went on: “Every ounce…taken from the bowels of our soil will yet have to be weighed up with rivers of tears.” His prescience was remarkable. Within scarcely a decade his country’s independence had been snuffed out by Britain, which lusted to control the world’s richest gold mines.
This anecdote finds many echoes across the ages and from country to country in a sweeping new history of Africa by Martin Meredith, a historian with an acute eye for detail and a firm grip on the forces that swept the continent. Africa’s profusion of natural wealth—whether gold, ivory or the very bodies of its inhabitants—served not to enrich its peoples but to impoverish and enslave them. Going back to the time of Egypt’s pharaohs, he notes, Africa’s riches have been coveted.
This is a familiar tale for Mr Meredith, a former journalist and a biographer with a deep affinity for Africa. For readers of his earlier book, “The State of Africa”, some bits may feel a touch too familiar, as he revisits old themes. Yet that is a minor quibble to take with a book that addresses one of the main criticisms of his previous work: that it limited itself to telling the story only of Africa’s half-century since independence. Liberated in time, Mr Meredith’s new book explores the horrors suffered by Africans at the hands of its early rulers and traces the forays of Arabs and Europeans into its interior in search of treasure.
Of wealth there was no shortage. In 1324, when King Mansa Musa of Mali stopped in Cairo while making the pilgrimage to Mecca, he distributed so much gold that he destroyed the value of money for at least a decade. His wealth, Mr Meredith contends, was so vast that he was the richest man the world had ever seen. Others made fortunes too, from the great caravans of ivory that snaked their way out of jungles or the boatloads of wild rubber harvested in the Congo, often carried by slaves who were then themselves sold.
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Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.