Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Frederick Jones (1893-1961) was one of the most prolific Black inventors ever. Frederick Jones patented more than sixty inventions, however, he is best known for inventing an automatic refrigeration system for long-haul trucks in 1935 (a roof-mounted cooling device). Jones was the first person to invent a practical, mechanical refrigeration system for trucks and railroad cars, which eliminated the risk of food spoilage during long-distance shipping trips. The system was, in turn, adapted to a variety of other common carriers, including ships. Frederick Jones was issued the patent on July 12, 1940 (#2,303,857).
(con't.)
Jones was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was orphaned at the age of nine. He was then raised by a priest in Kentucky. Jones left school after grade six and left the rectory to return to Cincinnati at age sixteen, where he got a job as an apprentice automobile mechanic. He boosted his natural mechanical ability and inventive mind with independent reading and study. In 1912, Jones moved to Hallock, Minnesota, where he worked as a mechanic on a 50,000-acre (200 km2) farm. After service with the U.S. Army in World War I, Jones returned to Hallock; while employed as a mechanic, Jones taught himself electronics and built a transmitter for the town's new radio station. He also invented a device to combine sound with motion pictures. This attracted the attention of Joseph A. Numero of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who hired Jones in 1930 to improve the sound equipment made by his firm, Cinema Supplies Inc.
Around 1935, Jones designed a portable air-cooling unit for trucks carrying perishable food, and received a patent for it on July 12, 1940. Numero sold his movie sound equipment business to RCA and formed a new company in partnership with Jones, the U.S. Thermo Control Company (later the Thermo King Corporation) which became a $3 million business by 1949. Jones's air coolers for trains, ships, and aircraft made it possible for the first time to ship perishable food long distances during any time of the year.
During his life, Jones was awarded sixty-one patents. Forty were for refrigeration equipment, while others went for portable X-ray machines, sound equipment, and gasoline engines. In 1944, Jones became the first African American to be elected into the American Society of Refrigeration Engineers, and during the 1950s he was a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the Bureau of Standards. In 1991, The National Medal of Technology was awarded to Joseph A. Numero and Frederick M. Jones.....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor (includes some stories from Tuesday :-)
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The House leadership battle continues... On Politics: Black Caucus chair says Democrats need diversity.
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The chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus says the Democratic leadership race between Reps. Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn is not a choice about one lawmaker versus the other.
But Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., wants this to be clear: An African American needs to be in the room when Nancy Pelosi, the likely top Democratic leader, makes decisions about how to counter the Republican majority.
"This is a multiracial society," Lee told USA TODAY. Clyburn "brings to the table what needs to be done for communities of color."
Hoyer and Clyburn are vying for the post of Democratic whip, the No. 2 slot in the party's leadership when the 112th Congress convenes in January. Democrats are losing a leadership position now that Republicans have won the House majority.
In a letter to his colleagues, Hoyer makes his case that his experience will help unify Democrats.
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If Obama is looking to keep America competitive, he could learn from the science and technology program for women at this historically black institution. The Root: Spelman College Students Win National Mobile App Competition
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In his first news conference after his midterm losses, President Obama reminded his audience that the important battle for the U.S. is remaining on top of global competition. If he's looking for a model, he need look no further than Spelman College in Atlanta -- the private, independent, historically black school for women -- and its strong science, technology, engineering and math program (STEM).
In October, undergraduates Jonecia Keels and Jazmine Miller won the 2010 AT&T Big Mobile on Campus Challenge for creating a next-generation e-learning mobile application. Previous winners of the competition were from Harvard and Stanford universities. The women split a $10,000 scholarship and had their choice of a mobile device.
The duo's mobile-only creation is the HBCU Buddy. The app, free on iTunes, educates users about historically black colleges and universities. It has customizable social networking features and information about every HBCU. Michele Brittingham of AT&T Services says the HBCU Buddy "is a very well-put-together and well-thought-out mobile application."
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May God have mercy on his soul. New York Times: A Suicide More Complex Than a Slogan
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In one of the last updates he posted on his Facebook page, Joseph Jefferson sounded like yet another young gay person succumbing to overwhelming social rejection, if not outright bullying.
"I could not bear the burden of living as a gay man of color in a world grown cold and hateful towards those of us who live and love differently than the so-called mainstream," wrote Mr. Jefferson, 26, who killed himself last month. A few days later, the organization where he had once worked, Gay Men of African Descent, staged "A Protest to Stop Gay Bullying and Suicides" and posted a large black-and-white photograph of Mr. Jefferson on its Web site alongside the listing for the event.
Bullying and suicide — an awareness of how closely those two can be linked in the lives of gay people has never been stronger than of late. But the facts of Mr. Jefferson’s life fit no clean narrative of fragile disempowerment.
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America should never turn it's backs on it's veterans. Black America Web: More Black War Veterans Ending Up Homeless
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Flags will fly today, bands will play, and hands will salute as the nation pays tribute to veterans who have served, sacrificed and even died while preserving freedom.
But while the parades go by for Veterans Day, one segment of the population will be far away from the celebrations – the homeless veterans.
The Veterans Administration estimates that on any given night, 107,000 veterans are homeless. And more than half of that number - 56 percent – are black, even though blacks account for only 12.8 percent of the U.S. population.
"If you want to help veterans, you have to address the issue of homelessness," says Richard Kingsberry, North Carolina state commander for the National Association of Black Veterans (NABVETS).
"A lot of black veterans are homeless. They are sleeping under bridges and in vacant buildings," he said.
"The military gets you in; they mold you and send you back home a different person than you were when you went in," Kingsberry told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "The problem for black veterans is that many are Vietnam vets. They experienced a backlash when they returned" and some still can’t deal with it, he said.
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Members of Canada’s only black military battalion which served in France during the First World War will be among those honoured at Queen’s Park during Thursday's Remembrance Day ceremony. Toronto Sun: Black soldiers to be honoured
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The 600-member No. 2 Construction Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, was formed in July 1916 after white officers refused to fight or socialize with black recruits. It was the country’s only segregated unit.
"The white soldiers didn’t want to be with, or share quarters with black soldiers," said Rosemary Sadlier, of the Ontario Black History Society. "Blacks have been defending Canada right from the beginning."
Sadlier said African-Canadians have fought for their country since 1783 and served in the War of 1812, both world wars and recent conflicts.
"A number of the soldiers were killed in battle back then," Sadlier said. "Many came back to their families wounded or as casualties."
Sadlier described as "very hurtful" a recent incident at a Royal Canadian Legion in Campbellford, Ont., where a man at a Halloween gathering dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member and pulled around another man in blackface with a rope.
"Rejected black recruits were often told that ‘This is a white man’s war,’" she said. "An incident like this causes hurt and is insensitive to the families of the men who died for this country."
She said in most cases, black soldiers were made to work harder than their white counterparts and received less food and pay than other military personnel.
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The creators of Chicago and Cabaret marry music and minstrelsy with the troubled history of nine young black men falsely accused of rape in 1930s Alabama -- with disturbing results. The Root: The Root Review: 'The Scottsboro Boys'
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Few episodes of racism in our country resonate like that of the trial of the Scottsboro boys. In 1931, white youths attacked nine young black men riding the rails from Memphis to Chattanooga, Tenn., to look for work. When the police arrived and held the black men responsible, two white women from Alabama at the scene also accused them of rape. Less than a month later, they were tried and found guilty in an Alabama courtroom. And though they won the right to another trial, almost all of them endured several more years of incarceration.
In 2004 the hugely successful musical team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Chicago and Cabaret), who have shown a propensity for choosing controversial subjects, decided to use the Scottsboro incident as the basis for their new musical. Susan Stroman (The Producers) was brought in to direct and choreograph, and David Thompson, who adapted the script for Chicago's revival, took on the book. The Scottsboro Boys arrived on Broadway this week, fresh from sold-out runs at the Vineyard Theater in New York and at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
The show begins quietly with a lone woman, played by Robin S. Walker (substituting for Sharon Washington), sitting primly on a chair, a neatly wrapped box on her lap. She will reappear in scene after scene, never speaking, representing all the mothers and women connected with the Scottsboro boys who patiently waited for them to be released. Behind her, silver chairs are piled on top of one another, the basic elements of Beowulf Boritt's ingenious set, which later turns into a courtroom and an execution room. Suddenly, nine rambunctious young men come racing down the theater's aisles, jump onto the stage and arrange the chairs in a circle.
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This movie seems to have split black men and black woman. Tyler Perry breathes new life into Ntozake Shange's unforgettable study of the struggles of black women. With an ensemble that includes Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson and Loretta Devine, the emotions are raw, often brutally so, and transcendent. LA Times: Movie review: 'For Colored Girls'
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"For Colored Girls" is not easy. Its poetry is hot and searing, its story an unbroken current of rage and pain and sex and abuse and solidarity and self and empowerment. Nine women — in screams, whispers and weeping — demand that you listen, that you don't look away, that you deal with the discomfort as they did.
It is a film destined to polarize. Many will hate it. Hopefully more will love it, or at least allow room for it, for its raw brutality, its extremes, its difficult truths.
Filmmaker Tyler Perry takes us into this heart of darkness with his remarkable adaptation of Ntozake Shange's series of poems, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf," first published in 1975. Designed for the stage, it was a sort of dance of life, a feminist and racial polemic with the women — draped in blue, yellow, red, brown, green, purple or orange — moving across the stage, each pausing to tell her story, moving on. It made its way from San Francisco to Broadway to much acclaim, but confounded those who thought about it as a movie.
Perry has found the answer. With a surgical precision, the writer-director cut it apart and reassembled it, using various pieces to create characters and storylines, keeping much of the poetry, writing the connective tissue himself so that it finds a new life, a somewhat different life on screen.
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[] Tyler Perry’s ‘For Colored Girls’ by kevinpowell
[] Has Congress forgotten about the black farmers? by sprednxtnd
[] It's Time to be Bold: Democrats and Black America by ColorOfChange
[] Can A 37-Year Old Black Man Be A "Real American"?!? by AverageBro
[] Poverty is the issue?...yeah, right! by princss6
[] MA Gov. Patrick nominates first black Chief Justice by Deoliver47
[] Ancient Africa: The Great Zimbabwe by Ojibwa
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
In the Dogon cosmology, the Andoumboulou are a failed, earlier form of Human Being, who live underground inhabiting holes in the Earth. The voice of the Andoumboulou is merely their breath; it is the music of the wind. Nathaniel Mackey takes this breath to the text; a reification of language to body, the ink on the page being as real as the skin that chatters for the Andoumboulou. He chronicles the journey of that voice, that music of the wind, as it courses over the land and time.
There is an explosion of stammers in the Andoumboulou's flawed world of abortive language. Though imperfect and flawed, meaning emerges in the errors. That meaning is beyond words; it is lost in human utterance; it is something to be determined as but a whisper from a human existence we can only speculate about, that we can only feel. A feeling like the wind on our cheeks; and grains of sand blown from our hands.
Song of the Andoumboulou: 55
Carnival morning they
were Greeks in Brazil,
Africans in Greek
disguise. Said of herself
she
was born in a house in
heaven. He said he was
born in the house next
door... They were in hell.
In Brazil they were
lovebait.
To abide by hearing was
what love was... To
love was to hear without
looking. Sound was the
beloved’s
mummy cloth... All to say,
said the exegete, love in
hell was a voice, to be spoken
to from behind, not be able
to turn and look... It
wasn’t Greece where they
were,
nor was it Benin... Carnival
morning in made-up hell, bodies
bathed in loquat light, would-be
song’s all the more would-be
title, "Sound and Cerement,"
voice
wound in bandages
raveling
lapse
Up all night, slept well
past noon. Awoke restless
having dreamt she awoke on
Lone Coast, wondering
afterwards what it came
to,
glimpsed interstice,
crevice,
crack... Saw her
dead mother and brother
pull up in a car, her brother
at the wheel not having driven
while alive, newly taught
by
death it appeared. A fancy car,
bigger
than any her mother had had while
alive, she too better off it
appeared... A wishful read, "it
appeared" notwithstanding, the
exegete impossibly benign. Dreamt
a dream
of dream’s end, anxious, unannounced,
Eronel’s nevermore namesake, Monk’s
anagrammatic Lenore... That the
dead return in luxury cars made
us
weep, pathetic its tin elegance,
pitiable,
sweet read misread,
would-be
sweet
-- Nathaniel Mackey
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