Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Throughout his life, Hyman Y. Chase was a man of great intellectual stature who liked to remind mere mortals, in a booming voice, that he had a PhD from Leland J. Stanford University. In 1936, at the age of 34, he was appointed Chairman of Howard University’s Zoology Department, which was financed by the Julius Rosenwald Fund.
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Chase was undoubtedly a brilliant academic, but by 1939, he was getting restless in the winds of war. Thanks to supporters like Eleanor Roosevelt, blacks were going to play a larger part in this war, and would no longer be relegated to the roles of truck-drivers and cooks. Talk of a black infantry regiment forming at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, stirred Chase to action. He left his job at Howard and entered active military service in 1940. His education earned him an officer’s rank and made him one of the first black commanding officers.
It was a tough road ahead. Chase’s first regiment was delayed at port in Virginia because the state government would not tolerate a large battalion of armed blacks in one of its ports. Chase endured this indignity, and the 366th Infantry Division was eventually deployed to North Africa. Chase’s unit ended up in Italy, where they were cut down by German fire on the Po River. Later, during occupation duty in Germany, Chase helped to mastermind the brilliant logistical plan to airlift supplies to the embattled city of Berlin, which had been blockaded by Soviet forces.
Throughout the war, charges of cowardice were made against black soldiers. Chase saw first-hand that the white officers assigned to black units were substandard, and believed that the real issue was poor leadership. (In the 1990s, Medals of Honor were awarded to seven black soldiers who served in the units that had been so harshly criticized during the war.) He knew that, in the future, it would be necessary to include well-trained black officers in the officer corp. By the time the war ended, Chase was motivated by a fury that only a man of his intelligence could focus and control. His fiery attitude angered many white officers, and he was forced to defend himself against charges that were intended to ruin his career......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Years of racist attitudes and policies underpin the segregation in America’s most racially divided cities. But at first it can be hard to spot the physical divides that once carved up those neighborhoods and keep them carved up today. Washington Post: How railroads, highways and other man-made lines racially divide America’s cities.
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Like many metaphors, "the other side of the tracks" was originally a literal epithet. Blacks were often historically restricted to neighborhoods separated from whites by railroads, turning the tracks into iron barriers of race and class.
In many cities, these dividing lines persist to this day — a reflection of decades of discriminatory policies and racism, but also of the power of infrastructure itself to segregate.
Look at racial maps of many American cities, and stark boundaries between neighboring black and white communities frequently denote an impassable railroad or highway, or a historically uncrossable avenue. Infrastructure has long played this role: reinforcing unspoken divides, walling off communities, containing their expansion, physically isolating them from schools or parks or neighbors nearby.
Research, in fact, suggests that American cities that were subdivided by railroads in the 19th century into physically discrete neighborhoods became much more segregated decades later following the Great Migration of blacks out of the rural South.
Railroad divides persist in Hartford, Conn.
Railroads and Freeways divide Tampa
Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., is carved up by all of these forces: by highways, local roads, railroads, parks, and rivers. As the Hispanic population has grown, it has been contained south of downtown, hemmed in on all four sides by railroads tracks, highways, and water.
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Black women are constantly told they're too angry, while the deck is stacked in favor of the Taylor Swifts. Salon: Nicki Minaj cares too much about MTV and the “white kids” awards— and here’s why she’s not wrong.
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Last year’s “Beyond the Lights” was an incredible movie that, like many incredible movies without massive marketing budgets (especially those with predominantly black characters), went overlooked in those end-of-year roundups featuring the best movies of 2014. Gina Prince Bythewood’s complex tale of love and growth firmly centers her protagonist, Noni, in a music industry built on sexism, racism and other troubling isms. Young Noni’s first introduction into this world comes at the beginning of the film, when she participates in a children’s talent show, and sings an astoundingly mature rendition of Nina Simone’s “Blackbird.” It’s no surprise, but it’s all the more painful when Noni loses to the blond-haired, subpar, tap-dancing white girl. Without aligning the “Anaconda” video with a Nina Simone rendition, it’s safe to say that this scene comes to mind today, as the MTV VMAs come under attack from practically all sides.
Nicki Minaj fans are shaking their heads over the “Anaconda” snub (and/or asking Taylor Swift to think about privilege and other such things before she tweets at Nicki ever again). Rock fans are trying to figure out how Arctic Monkeys got nominated for a video they released in 2013. And some Kendrick Lamar fans are noting that his “Alright,” video—a powerful takedown of America’s murderous police—was nominated for Video of the Year, but not for Video with a Social Message (a suspicious snub when a song like Rihanna’s far more patriotic “American Oxygen” was nominated, suggesting that MTV only approves of a very particular “social message”). The VMA nominations failed on multiple fronts, it just so happens that one vocal female rapper isn’t prepared to let MTV slide.
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The most segregated public schools in America are in New York City. Slate: Why New York City Is Experimenting With New Ways to Desegregate Public Schools.
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Yani Lopez, of Harlem, wanted her daughter Kiami to go to a good kindergarten—one with art classes, foreign languages, and a diverse student body. Instead, Kiami was assigned last year to a neighborhood school with limited resources, no art classes, and a student body that was almost exclusively black and Hispanic. This assignment was all but destiny: A study published last year by UCLA researchers spotlighted the state of New York’s schools as the most segregated in the nation, largely due to race and class separation within New York City’s public schools.
Advocates of school integration say the tide is starting to change in the country’s largest school district—a reflection of growing demand across the country from families eager for more heterogeneous schools and city leaders, including Mayor Bill de Blasio and School Chancellor Carmen Fariña, more open to a new desegregation policy. But in New York and elsewhere, most of the recent momentum has come from grassroots groups seeking small-scale changes to the school assignment process that allow districts to create more diverse schools one by one. As such, the city could be an important test case for whether meaningful school integration can be achieved through localized initiatives rather than a citywide shift in policy.
The city has taken one broad, if mostly symbolic, step. In May, the City Council passed the School Diversity Accountability Act, which de Blasio signed into law in June and called “a step further in our efforts to ensure that our schools are as diverse as our city and people of all communities live, learn, and work together.” The new law requires the city Department of Education to provide detailed demographic data on schools and identify the steps it plans to improve diversity within schools. It also requires the education department to adopt a policy that considers diversity in its school assignment process, though the law doesn’t specify any steps and the city hasn’t yet adopted any.
One of the bill’s main sponsors, Council Member Brad Lander of Brooklyn, says that while this new legislation won’t immediately desegregate schools, it’s an important first measure. He says now is a good moment to explore new desegregation options, citing openness from de Blasio and Fariña, to more progressive education policies.
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As Haiti asks the international community for more than $30 million to help make its elections a success, not everyone is convinced the balloting will go off without a hitch. Miami Herald: Haiti pleads for international help on elections.
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Haiti’s prime minister and elections council president sought to reassure the international community Thursday that all was on track for the country’s most complex election process in history.
“We’ve already started the process, and progress is visible,” Pierre-Louis Opont, president of the Provisional Electoral Council, known as the CEP, told Haiti’s international partners in New York during a United Nations donors conference. The country was seeking $31 million to cover election costs. At the meeting, Brazil, Canada, Norway and the United States promised to provide additional funding, the spokesman for the U.N. Secretary General said. It was unclear Thursday how much.
An effusive Opont told donors that political parties, civil society and voters had confidence in the elections council, adding that “we have headed off skeptics.”
But serious doubts remain, including notification of polling sites for many of the 5.8 million voters, exclusion of some candidates and the council’s tardiness in almost everything from recruiting and training of poll workers to the publication of the final lists of candidates.
In 2010 Haitian voters formed lines in all directions around election workers - Miami Herald
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Death's in prison by the numbers. FiveThirtyEight: Being Arrested Is Nearly Twice As Deadly For African-Americans As Whites.
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Sandra Bland’s death last week in a Texas jail — police say she committed suicide, but her family and friends have disputed that — has provoked questions about how police treated her and how they treat other African-American women.
The investigation being conducted by the Texas Rangers and the FBI will help determine what happened to Bland specifically, but we can put her death in context with national statistics on deaths in custody and arrest-related deaths.1 The data includes demographic information, so we can see how it varies by race.
Among whites, African-Americans and Hispanics being held in local jails, African-Americans are the least likely to commit suicide.2 Instead, illnesses — and heart disease, in particular — are the most common causes of deaths for black inmates while in custody.3 White inmates are five times as likely to commit suicide in jail as blacks.
Although African-Americans are at a lower risk of death in local jails than whites overall (largely because of the higher rate of suicide among white inmates), they face a higher risk of arrest-related death specifically. Among every 100,000 black people who are arrested, 5.6 die, compared with only 3 of every 100,000 white arrestees.
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