Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Elijah J. McCoy (May 2, 1844 – October 10, 1929) was a Black Canadian-born engineer and inventor of African American descent. McCoy is notable for 57 US patents, most having to do with the lubrication of steam engines. McCoy was born in Canada, to parents who fled slavery in the US. As a teenager, McCoy trained in Scotland as an engineer. Later as an adult, unable to find work as an engineer in the United States, he took a job working for a railroad. Working around trains, McCoy subsequently invented a lubrication device to make railroad operations more efficient. There is also evidence that although a popular expression was not created by his admirers, fans of his work made it popular.
Elijah McCoy was born on May 2, 1844, in Colchester, Ontario, Canada, to George and Mildred Goins McCoy. The McCoys were fugitive slaves who escaped from Kentucky to Canada via the Underground Railroad. In 1847, the large McCoy family returned to the United States, settling in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Starting at a young age, McCoy showed a strong interest in mechanics. His parents arranged for him to travel to Scotland at the age of 15 for an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering. He returned home to Michigan after becoming certified as a mechanical engineer.
Despite his qualifications, McCoy was unable to find employment as an engineer in the United States due to racial barriers. In the 1890’s skilled professional positions were not available for African Americans regardless of their education. So McCoy accepted a position as a fireman and oiler for the Michigan Central Railroad. It was during working directly on trains that he developed his first major inventions.
After studying the inefficiencies inherent in the existing system of oiling axles, McCoy invented a lubricating cup that distributed oil evenly over the engine's moving parts. He obtained a patent for this invention, which allowed trains to run continuously for long periods of time without pausing for maintenance.
McCoy continued to refine his devices, receiving nearly 60 patents over the course of his life. While the majority of his inventions related to lubrication systems, he also developed designs for an ironing board, a lawn sprinkler, and various other machines. Lacking the capital with which to manufacture his lubricators in large numbers, McCoy typically sold his patent rights to his employers or sold them to investors. Although McCoy's achievements were recognized in his own time, his name did not appear on the majority of the products that he devised due to racism by white purchasing agents. In 1920, toward the end of his life, McCoy formed the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company to produce lubricators bearing his name.
The creation of the popular expression "The real McCoy", meaning "the real thing", has been incorrectly attributed to Elijah McCoy's oil-drip cup invention. The expression was already 50 years old at the time. One theory is that railroad engineers looking to avoid inferior copies would request it by name, and inquire if a locomotive was fitted with "the real McCoy system".
This theory is mentioned in Elijah McCoy's biography at the National Inventors Hall of Fame. His biography quotes the December 1966 issue of Ebony in an advertisement for Old Taylor bourbon whiskey: "But the most famous legacy McCoy left his country was his name." Also a 1985 pamphlet printed by the Empak Publishing Company also notes the phrase's origin but does not elaborate. But regardless of the phrase’s true origins, there is a lot of evidence that this myth made the "The real McCoy" expression popular with urban trendsetters in the black community, who then made the expression part of pop-culture.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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MAGA Supporter Crashes Out at Black Author Book Talk After Getting the Boot for Spewing Racist Insults. MSN: 'Stop Telling Me What to Do!'
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On May 21, Black author Dr. La’Tonya Rease Miles appeared at a book talk to promote her new memoir, “Smart Girl: A First-Gen Origin Story.” Attendees gathered at the quaint James M. Duncan Branch Library in Alexandria, Virginia, hoping to get their books signed and to hear Miles’ inspiring story of being the first in her family to attend and graduate from a four-year university.
Instead, they got an earful from a belligerent Trump supporter who crashed the reading.
“This is not Nazi Germany! I don’t need to do anything. Stop telling me what to do,” shouted the older white man.
According to the caption of the now viral video, he infiltrated what appears to have been the book talk from March 17 and began heckling the author and harassing her with “racist rants.” Decked out in a fiery red Make America Great Again t-shirt, the man refused to calm down or lower his voice, and likened library security to Nazi Germany, “communist China,” and the “f-cking USSR” when they told him to shush.
“Is this Nazi Germany?” he demanded after being asked to leave. “Call the cops, you’re not the police. You can’t tell me what to do,” he yelled at a Black female security guard, who eyed him stoically as he berated her with foul language. The meltdown continued as he flipped off the room of avid readers and yelled, “Take a picture of it,” referring to ridiculous antics, before turning on his heel and leaving.
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A new campaign calling itself the “Educate to Liberate Tour” is preparing to roll through historically Black colleges and universities this fall, just in time for homecoming season.
The tour, backed by Turning Point USA and branded through its blackface offshoot BLEXIT, claims it wants to spark dialogue and promote “free thought” on HBCU campuses. But after watching similar operations play out elsewhere, the goal looks less like debate and learning and more like provocation and a political incursion into sacred Black spaces under the guise of outreach.
The announcement arrived in the shadow of two flashpoints.
First came the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which right-wing media swiftly reframed as a martyrdom story about “free speech.” His death is now fueling a wave of right-wing mobilization, with activists vowing to carry his torch by “reclaiming” campuses.
Then, in late September, a group called Fearless Debates, a handful of white men in MAGA hats wielding signs that read “DEI Should Be Illegal” and “Deport All Illegals Now,” showed up uninvited at Tennessee State University. Students confronted them, and campus police escorted them off the grounds. Within hours, conservative pundits flooded social media, portraying the encounter as another example of “Black intolerance.”
Groups like Turning Point USA, Fearless Debates, and now BLEXIT understand the optics economy. They show up unannounced, stir tension, film the reactions, and package the footage for viral consumption. The aim isn’t dialogue, it’s content. And the content fuels a pipeline of outrage that drives right-wing clicks, donations, and television segments. The Tennessee State stunt was never about that single campus. It was a stress test and a rehearsal to see how Black students might react when the full BLEXIT roadshow pulls up during homecoming season.
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Before Herriot Tabuteau became a billionaire CEO taking on depression and Alzheimer’s, he was a little boy in Haiti learning how to survive on resilience. Today, he’s rewriting what’s possible in biotech, leading a company worth $6 billion, all while staying rooted in the lessons that shaped him.
“It taught me resilience,” Tabuteau said of his childhood in an interview with Forbes, a word that has been the throughline of his journey from Wall Street to the lab.
That same determination carried him from Port-au-Prince to New York City, from Yale’s medical halls to Wall Street, and eventually into the heart of one of the hardest challenges in medicine: finding treatments for the brain. Today, Axsome, a company named after two parts of a nerve cell, the “axon” and the “soma,” has grown from what Tabuteau calls “the broom closet,” a three-desk office in Rockefeller Center, into a $6 billion player in biotech. With three FDA-approved drugs on the market and five more in development, Axsome is targeting some of the toughest challenges in medicine: depression, ADHD, and Alzheimer’s.
At just 9 years old, he moved from Haiti, where he says he experienced physical, nutritional, and emotional neglect, to Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his father and adoptive mother. His academic path was equally ambitious with degrees in molecular biology and biochemistry at Wesleyan, followed by Yale School of Medicine, where he initially planned to become a neurosurgeon. But witnessing the visible unhappiness of many of his physician mentors pushed him away from the operating room and toward Wall Street.
Swapping scalpels for spreadsheets and deal structures, Tabuteau spent nearly two decades in healthcare investment banking and hedge funds, where he reportedly observed the rise and fall of countless biotech startups.
When he finally launched Axsome, Tabuteau went against the grain. Instead of relying on venture capital, he self-funded the company with the support of friends and family. Instead of chasing one breakthrough drug, he built a diversified pipeline to reduce risk. And unlike most of his peers, he ran clinical trials in-house to cut costs nearly in half.
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As Target continues to face widespread boycotts following a move away from its DEI initiatives, The Lip Bar, the largest Black-owned beauty brand carried by the big box chain, is thriving.
During a recent interview with The Beauty Independent, Melissa Butler, founder of The Lip Bar, shared how her brand has not only managed to survive the turbulence but is projected to grow significantly this year. Sales are expected to be up by 40%, while earnings before taxes are anticipated to double.
“Our sales are absolutely down any given week at Target,” she admitted to the outlet. “We’re down approximately 30% to 40%, which is very painful for a small business. I think that we will see some businesses suffer fates that we don’t want to see from this.”
However, she added, long before Target rolled back its diversity and inclusion programs, The Lip Bar had already laid the groundwork for a strategy built to weather uncertainty.
“Even before the Target DEI news came out, our strategy was to broaden our scope at a product level,” she continued. “A lot of people know us for lip, but don’t know that we sell tinted moisturizer, concealer or skincare. Our strategy was to increase visibility of our additional products and additional retailers and to diversify our audience.”
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For centuries, the transatlantic slave trade has been treated as history — a horrific chapter to be memorialized but not rectified. Last week at the United Nations General Assembly, Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, forced the world to confront that fiction, calling the trade “the greatest crime against humanity” and demanding reparations on behalf of Africans and their descendants worldwide.
Mahama announced plans to submit the first formal motion calling for reparative justice through a global body. The proposal challenges the international community to back a framework of U.N.-endorsed compensation for the centuries of stolen labor, wealth extraction, and generational harm inflicted on Africans and their descendants. For Black Americans, it could become a watershed moment, amplifying calls for recognition and material redress in the U.S.
“Reparatory justice is not about pity,” Mahama said as reported by Capital B News. “It is about recognition, responsibility, and restitution. The descendants of Africa deserve the dignity of acknowledgement and the fairness of redress.”
Mahama’s address underscored a united front, with support from the Central African Republic and allies in Latin America such as Bolivia, which has advocated for financial restitution, environmental restoration, and the return of stolen cultural heritage. “We demand reparations for the enslavement of our people and the colonization of our land that resulted in the theft of natural resources, as well as the looting of artifacts and other items of cultural heritage that have yet to be returned in total,” Mahama added.
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A school dropout who tried out as a bank cashier before becoming a hairdresser, Tano’s resilience recently came in handy when speaking to a teenager worried about failing their exams. “I told her: ‘Don’t think negatively,’” Tano said. “‘Even if you fail, how can you think that you have failed in life?’”
Mental health remains a taboo subject in most parts of Africa, even though according to the World Health Organization more than 116 million people have mental health problems on the continent. Therapy is in critically short supply, with 1.4 mental health workers for every 100,000 people.
Across Black communities, hairdressers have become a safe space, especially in communities with little or no access to mental health care – or quality healthcare in general.
Bluemind Foundation, a nonprofit organisation working across Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Togo, has plugged into the hairdresser-client relationship through its Heal by Hair initiative. According to its founder, Marie-Alix de Putter, more than 400 hairdressers, including Tano, have been trained in the last two years to act as therapeutic first responders or “mental health ambassadors”, reaching more than 100,000 women. By 2030, de Putter hopes to reach more than 1,000 hairdressers in 20 countries.
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