Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Jewel Plummer Cobb was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 17, 1924, and spent her childhood as an only child. She is from the third generation of the Plummer family who sought a career in medical science. Her grandfather, a freed slave, graduated from Howard University in 1898 and became a pharmacist. Her father, Frank V. Plummer, became a physician after he graduated from Cornell University, where he helped found the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. Her mother, Carriebel (Cole) Plummer, taught dance and was a physical education teacher.
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Becoming a noted cell biologist was a difficult road for Cobb. Because she was African American, she faced segregation during the course of her education. Although she came from an upper-middle-class background, Cobb found that she had to go to black Chicago public schools. Cobb was in constant contact with African American professionals and was well aware of their accomplishments. She decided not to let anything stand in the way of her own success.
Supplementing her education with books from her father's library, Cobb had access to scientific journals and magazines, current event periodicals, and materials on successful African Americans. Although Cobb was at first interested in becoming a physical education teacher like her mother and aunt, she found that she was interested in biology when, in her sophomore year in high school, she studied cells through a microscope. An honors student, Cobb showed academic promise. She had a solid education and a drive to learn.
Although her interest in biology could have led her to become a medical doctor, Cobb was not interested in working directly with the sick. She was, nonetheless, interested in the theory of disease, an interest that later led her to become one of the leading cancer researchers in the United States.
When it came time to enroll in college, Cobb selected the University of Michigan. Due to the segregation of the dormitories at the university, all African Americans, regardless of their year of study, were forced to live in one house. In disgust at the racism still found there, Cobb left the University of Michigan after three semesters and earned her B.A. in biology from traditionally black Talladega College in Alabama.
Cobb applied for a teaching fellowship at New York University. Because of her race, she was at first turned down for the position. Cobb refused to accept the rejection and personally visited the college, which then accepted her because her credentials were so impressive. In 1945, Cobb started her career in teaching as a fellow there. In 1947, she earned an M.S. in cell physiology and in 1950 she earned a Ph.D. in cell physiology from New York University. Her dissertation was titled "Mechanisms of Pigment Formation."
Cobb was named an independent investigator for the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1949. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cancer Research Foundation of Harlem Hospital and at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Attracted by theoretical approaches to biology, Cobb entered the field of research. Understanding the processes of living cells was at the heart of her studies. In particular, she found that tissue cultures were an interesting area of research. Determining which cells grew outside the body led to her study with Dorothy Walker Jones that looked at how human cancer cells were affected by drugs......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Looking back at an amazing film, book, and play. New Republic: 'The Color Purple' Is a Cultural Touchstone for Black Female Self-Love.
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Beyoncé quoted the movie in the liner notes of her first solo album. When Kerry Washington appeared on the cover of InStyle with dubiously light skin, black women across Twitter referenced it. A type of natural hair twists is named after it. And when a friend texted me that she was eloping, I responded by sending her a scene from the movie. Thirty years since its film adaptation, The Color Purple lingers as perhaps the cultural touchstone for black women in America, a kind of lingua franca of familiarity and friendship.
Alice Walker—a former Ms. Magazine editor, the daughter of sharecroppers—published The Color Purple in 1982. It was the first work by a black woman to win both the Pulitzer and National Book awards. Beyoncé appropriation aside, though, the story isn’t about feminism as much as it is about empowering its audience by unburdening us of pathos and cultural shame.
Both the novel and the film adaptation were a controversial and cathartic affront to the politics of respectability—the black middle class value set that dictates which behaviors are “appropriate” for black people. The protagonist, Celie, is a survivor of incest who lives most of her life as the servant of a violent man who refuses to marry her; in his eyes, her ugliness makes her fit for backbreaking work and little else. Set in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century, the narrative is about abuse: physical, emotional, and sexual—the story of a black woman who is raped by her stepfather and only escapes to be caught in a relationship with another tyrannical man, “Mr. —.”
Spike Lee said that the Steven Spielberg–produced film was “done with hate,” and that the Mr.— character was a “one-note animal.” The Coalition Against Black Exploitation protested The Color Purple’s 1985 Los Angeles premiere for its depiction of black men abusing black women. The novelist Ishmael Reed called The Color Purple “a Nazi conspiracy,” and even suggested that both the novel and the film were critically acclaimed expressly because they slam black men.
Reed was wrong then and he’s wrong now. The popularity of The Color Purple has very little to do with besmirching black men. Instead, it has everything to do with black women’s rejection of respectability politics: from the lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug, Mr.—’s ex-lover; to the representation of traditional Christianity as small-minded and stifling; to the narrative’s assertion that domestic violence arises from patriarchal hysteria about women’s strength, not our weakness.
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Immigrants from the African country, and their descendants, are excelling at the top levels of high school, college and professional sports, largely as an outgrowth of their pursuit of education. New York Times: More Nigerian-Americans Are Reaching Highest Levels of Sports.
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At Arizona State’s recent Senior Day celebration, guard Promise Amukamara was escorted onto the basketball court by her four sisters, whose mellifluous names spoke of royalty and hope — Peace, a teammate, along with Princess, Precious and Passionate.
Their brother, Prince, a cornerback for the Giants, sent his well wishes in a text message.
“All of them got scholarships to university,” said Christy Amukamara, the family matriarch. She smiled. “That was a great relief for us.”
Technically, Passionate, a high school senior, had yet to sign a scholarship offer as her team played for an Arizona prep basketball championship. Still, the Amukamaras are at the forefront of a growing number of Nigerian-American athletes, born in the United States, who are excelling at the top levels of high school, college and professional sports.
Andre Iguodala and Victor Oladipo play in the N.B.A., and Ime Udoka is an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs. The brothers Samuel and Emmanuel Acho are in the N.F.L. The sisters Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike of the W.N.B.A. were the only siblings both drafted No. 1 over all in a professional sport besides Peyton and Eli Manning. Jahlil Okafor of Duke is predicted by many to be the first pick in the coming N.B.A. draft. And the sprinter Courtney Okolo of the University of Texas set a women’s N.C.A.A. record of 50.03 seconds at 400 meters last spring
Typically, these athletes have parents or grandparents who came to the United States to study or to escape the 1980s-era military regime in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, with about 175 million people living in an area twice the size of California.
About 380,000 Nigerian immigrants and their children live in the United States, up from 25,000 in 1980. They have settled in metropolitan areas like New York, Houston and Washington, and as a group, they are far more likely than the overall American population to receive undergraduate and advanced degrees, according to a 2014 analysis done for the Rockefeller Foundation and the Aspen Institute.
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Very interesting move by a major company. Color Lines: What Racial Diversity Looks Like at Starbucks.
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As you’ve probably read on Morning Rush or seen on Black Twitter, Starbucks has launched a race initiative. The chain is asking its baristas across its 12,000 United States stores to spark dicussions about the thorny topic of race with customers by writing the words “Race together” on their cups.
According to the corporation’s “newsroom,” CEO Howard Schultz sowed the seeds for the initiative in December by distributing a letter to all U.S. employees about how he was watching “with a heavy heart” the “tragic events and unrest” connected to white police killings of black victims including Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
At an all-staff meeting that month at its Seattle headquarters, employees “representing various ages, races and ethnicities passed a microphone and shared personal stories” with Schultz, who has said, “We at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America. Not to point fingers or to place blame, and not because we have answers, but because staying silent is not who we are.”
Starbucks says it held subsequent “open race dialogues” in Chicago, L.A., New York City, Oakland and St. Louis. The company claims that baristas in some of those cities took it upon themselves to write “Race Together” on their customers’ cups. Corporate picked up the tactic, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, and partnered wtih USA Today to create special supplements about race.
Talking about race is what we’re all about at Colorlines. While we can appreciate individual conversations, we believe that systemic change is crucial. So we decided to take a quick look at how Starbucks does the very basic concept of racial diversity.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz
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Denied the right to vote in 2014 using student IDs, these students from Fisk and Tennessee State are taking their fight to federal court. The Root: 9 HBCU Students Just Made the Voter-ID War Hot Again.
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The voter-ID war just opened up a huge new front. This time in Tennessee. A group of nine students from HBCUs Fisk and Tennessee State have filed a federal lawsuit against the Volunteer State’s heavily contested and controversial voter-ID law.
The suit was filed by the Nashville Student Organizing Committee, a coalition of student activists established in February 2014. The plaintiffs were all disallowed from voting in 2014 because they carried student IDs as identification. NSOC retained the Washington, D.C.-based Fair Elections Legal Network, which then partnered with the local Nashville-based firm Barrett Johnston Martin & Garrison as part of a legal project to restore student voting rights in the state.
The case marks a highly unprecedented turning point in the ongoing conflict over voter ID and other Republican-led voter-suppression laws accused of targeting Democratic-friendly young, minority and low-income voters. With Republicans expanding their electoral gains in state legislatures, voter-ID laws have become a common feature in many key states and, as initial data suggest, disproportionately impacted large populations of color.
Observers are watching the new Tennessee case with heavy interest, since it appears to be the first student-led legal action of its kind. Some view it as Supreme Court-worthy and a savvy political maneuver on the part of black youth activists that could have far-reaching implications beyond Tennessee. The suit may very well advance because the Middle Tennessee federal district court is dominated by judges appointed by Democratic presidents. Chief Judge Kevin Sharp was recently appointed by President Barack Obama.
Members of the Nashville Student Organizing Committee at the Tennessee Capitol with a message that voter-ID laws silence students’ voices, March 25, 2014, in Nashville
COURTESY OF NASHVILLE STUDENT ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
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The governor of Virginia has called for an investigation into the rough arrest of a university student who appears in a photo with a bloody face as he is being held down by an officer. The Grio: Virginia governor calls for investigation into UVA student Martese Johnson’s arrest.
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About 1,000 students gathered at the University of Virginia campus Wednesday night to demand justice for Martese Johnson, whose lawyer said he needed 10 stitches in his head following the arrest.
The Alcoholic Beverage Control agent who made the arrest early Wednesday, listed in court records as J. Miller, said in the arrest report that Johnson “was very agitated and belligerent.” Johnson was charged on two counts: obstruction of justice without force, and public swearing or intoxication, Charlottesville General District Court records show.
A statement from a group calling itself “Concerned Black Students,” however, claims the arrest was unprovoked and extreme.
“The brutish force used resulted in his head and bodily injuries,” the group said in a statement. “His treatment was unprovoked as he did not resist questioning or arrest.”
Johnson was on hand for Wednesday night’s rally, flanked by several students. He spoke briefly and kept touching his face where he received stitches from the scuffle with police.
“I beg for you guys to please respect everyone here,” Johnson told the crowd. “We really are one community.”
His lawyer, Daniel P. Watkins, said Johnson is a 20-year-old, third-year student at UVA who is majoring in Italian and Media Studies, holds “numerous leadership positions” at the school, and has no criminal record.
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community Front Porch!
Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.