Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Henry Ransom Cecil McBay (1914–1995) was an African - American chemist and a teacher.
McBay was born "Henry Ransom McBay" (named from his maternal grandfather, Henry Ransom) in 1914 in Mexia, Texas. His father, William Cecil McBay, was a barber who eventually became an embalmer and funeral director; his mother, Roberta Ransom (McBay), was a seamstress.
McBay was able to receive a good education because of his proficiency in math. He was able to gain admission to Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and paid for his education by working in the college’s dining-hall and post office. Inspired by his math and chemistry professors, McBay studied organic chemistry and earned his B.S. degree in 1934. His Wiley professors helped him acquire a scholarship to Atlanta to work on his next degree.
With only $1.65 in his pocket, McBay immediately took a job in the Atlanta University dining hall so he could eat. After only a few days on campus, his faculty advisor, Professor K. A. Huggins, arranged for him to work in the chemistry laboratory.
McBay began to help Huggins study new types of plastics that had properties similar to natural rubber. Soon, McBay was performing his own analysis of the plastics. When the project was finished, he received his master’s degree from Atlanta University and Huggins received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. This indirect connection to the University of Chicago would later be important to his career.
After earning his master’s degree, he returned to Wiley College so he could help his younger brother and sister pay for college. However, going “home” proved to be a disappointment. Some faculty members still thought of him as their student and never accepted McBay as an academic peer. Because of his devotion to his siblings, however, he remained at Wiley until his brother received his college degree and his parents were able to pay for his sister’s education.
In 1938 McBay took a better-paying teaching job at a Quindaro, Kansas junior college. At the end of the first year, he enrolled in the University of Chicago summer school program, where he received good grades for that term. When he returned to Quindaro, he found that the new junior college principal had, for political reasons, hired an instructor in his place.
McBay then moved to a high school mathematics teaching position in Huntsville, Texas, where he stayed for three semesters. He then joined a newly formed research team at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama assigned the task of finding a suitable substitute for jute fiber. Indian shipments of jute, which was used for rope and fabrics for sacks, had ended due to World War I.
The Tuskegee team hoped to prove that okra stems would be an effective substitute, but McBay proved that by the time an okra plant had matured, the stems were too brittle. Okra could be harvested for food or for fiber, but not for both. Ironically, McBay had worked himself out of a job.......Read More
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Black Americans are far less likely than their white peers to successfully erase their debts in court—and a network of attorneys profits as a result. The Atlantic: Caught in the Bankruptcy Feedback Loop
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Novasha Miller pushed through the revolving doors of the black glass tower on Jefferson Avenue last December and felt a rush of déjà vu. The building, conspicuous in Memphis’ modest skyline along the Mississippi River, looms over its neighbors. Then she remembered: Years ago, as a teenager, she’d accompanied her mother inside.
Now she was 32, herself the mother of a teenager, and she was entering the same door, taking the same elevator. Like her mother before her, Miller was filing for bankruptcy.
She’d cried when she made the decision, but with three boys and one uneven paycheck, every month was a narrow escape. A debt collector had recently won a court judgment against her and, along with that, the ability to seize a chunk of her pay. Soon, she would be forced to decide between groceries or electricity.
Bankruptcy, she figured, despite its stink of shame and failure, would stop all that. She could begin anew: older, wiser, and with a job at a catering company that paid $10.50 an hour, a good bump from her last one. She could keep dreaming of a life where she had money left over at the end of each month, a chance of one day owning a home.
What Miller didn’t know when she swallowed her pride and called a local bankruptcy attorney is that she would probably end up right back where she started, with the same debts, in the same crisis. For the black debtors who, for generations, have made Memphis the bankruptcy capital of the U.S., the system delivers neither forgiveness nor renewal.
Up on the sixth floor of that tower where I met Miller last February, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Tennessee appeared to be a well-functioning machine. Debtors, nearly all black like her, crowded the wedge-shaped waiting area as lawyers, paralegals, and court staff, almost all white, milled about in front. Hundreds of cases are filed here every week, and those who oversee and administer the process all proudly note the court’s marvelous efficiency. Millions of dollars flow smoothly to creditors, to the court, to bankruptcy attorneys.
But the machine hides a harsh reality. When ProPublica analyzed consumer bankruptcy filings nationwide, the district stood out, both for the stunning number of cases in which debtors were unable to get relief, and for the reasons why. In Memphis, an entrenched legal culture has made bankruptcy a boon for attorneys while miring clients like Miller in a cycle of futility.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Why is public transportation so important. States have trapped millions of Americans in crippling debt by taking away their driver’s licenses. Can the damage be undone? Slate: Too Broke to Drive
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The first time Shane Moon lost his driver’s license was in 2013, when his girlfriend was pregnant with his first child. Moon, a construction worker in Lapeer, Michigan, near Flint, was having trouble making ends meet and had let his car insurance lapse. “I don’t make a whole lot of money,” Moon said. “It’s the only thing I could possibly get away with not paying.” He got a ticket for driving without insurance and a special Michigan penalty called a “driver responsibility fee,” which can cost violators up to $1,000 over two years. He couldn’t afford to pay that either and missed his court appearance. His license was suspended, bringing on an additional reinstatement fee. But he had to keep driving to get to construction jobs, often 90 miles from home. Each time he was pulled over—often for his outdated tags—the state hit him with another ticket for hundreds of dollars.
Four years later, Moon is homeless and struggling to keep up with tickets that have him paying as much as a third of his income to local and state governments each year for fines and fees alone. “My ship has sank. I don’t know how I’ll make it out of it this time. I feel like a total loser failing my family,” he told me. “If I can’t pay my tickets, shame on me, but don’t take my license away from me. Don’t take my standard of living away from me.” He continues to drive to work every day, without insurance or a license.
Moon is one of tens of thousands of Michiganders who have been trapped in a cycle of debt and criminality stemming from a suspended driver’s license and the accompanying series of fines that begin with the state’s driver responsibility fee. The penalty was first proposed in 2003, by Michigan state Sen. Jud Gilbert, who sponsored a bill to create an automatic fine tacked onto vehicular offenses both mundane ($100 for hitting seven points on a license) and serious ($1,000 for murder). The state was in a financial crisis, but as the fee’s name implied, Gilbert thought the new penalties—suggested to him by the majority leader at the time—would improve driver safety. They were portrayed that way in the press, too: The Detroit Free Press’ driving columnist called the fee an “immaturity penalty.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here is some news which is altogether of the moment but which I had missed. In fact, from what I can tell it’s received relatively little news attention at all beyond Richmond – and not terribly much even there. A state commission in Virginia is planning an anti-slavery monument which will be built in downtown Richmond, specifically on Brown’s Island. So far, nothing terribly remarkable. But one of the 10 figures to be honored in the monument is Nat Turner, who led the largest and deadliest slave rebellion in United States’ history in 1831.
Also honored will be Gabriel, often incorrectly referred to as Gabriel Prosser, who planned another slave rebellion in 1800 but was caught and executed before his planned rebellion began.
In the last half-century, the US has been fairly open to honoring African-Americans who played key roles in African-American history, the civil rights movement and all the other reasons we honor historical figures. Nat Turner is different. Nat Turner wasn’t a civil rights leader or anti-slavery activist. Nor was his rebellion any sort of regular military operation. Slave rebellions never are. They’re total efforts. In slave revolts, defeat on either side means almost certain death – that is almost universally true for the rebels and often for the masters. So the violence is universally brutal and unyielding on both sides.
The decision was not without controversy. Indeed, one of the people who testified against including Turner on the memorial was an African-American Professor of History at the University of Richmond and founding curator of African-American history at the Virginia Historical Society, Lauranett Lee. Lee seems to have argued against including Turner because many of his victims were women and children and because the immediate consequence of the revolt was the murder of numerous other slaves who played no part in the rebellion.
Turner raised a force of more than 70 enslaved and free blacks and killed roughly 60 whites in a spree of killing meant to rally slaves to the rebellion and terrorize Virginia’s white population. There are contemporary reports that this period of mass killing was only envisioned continuing until Turner’s force established a hold on some area of land. But our sources for the entire rebellion, as with virtually all slave rebellions, are compromised and ambiguous. Once Turner’s rebellion was stopped the state of Virginia executed 56 slaves who were believed to have participated in it. Turner himself was finally caught and executed. In addition, a far greater number of free and enslaved blacks were killed by militias and irregular paramilitaries in a mix of revenge killings, efforts to counter-terrorize the free and enslaved black population and genuine, if likely paranoid, fears of more or continued rebellions. The great majority of the black Virginians killed in the follow-on orgy of violence had no involvement in the rebellion at all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On August 28, 1963, basketball superstar and activist Bill Russell sat in the second row at the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. It became one of the most famous civil rights rallies in the country’s history. But Russell called it a “mere picnic” — a radical idea that had been “compromised” by organizers worried about appeasing then-President Kennedy.
Fifty-four years later, this story of activism compromised repeats itself.
Last Sunday, in the largest single-day athlete protest in American sports history, players across the league linked arms and took a knee during the national anthem. But it was a toothless gesture. The demonstration, which started as a protest against police brutality by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, had become a “mere picnic.”
Last weekend’s wave of protest was prompted by an angry rebuke by President Trump during a rally in Alabama. The president called for any “son of a bitch” who took a knee to be fired by the NFL. In response, players across the nation knelt in front of the flag during Sunday’s games. But these protests meant something different. Billionaire team owners who had donated to Trump’s campaign joined in. The symbol of taking a knee came to mean something else — unity, anger toward Trump, free speech. Kaepernick’s bold statement against systemic racism had been co-opted.
The beauty and brilliance of Kaepernick’s protest the previous season is that it put all athletes and fans on notice. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told reporters. He did not mince words.
And his truth drew the ire of white fans. For two minutes, they had to confront systemic racism and police brutality, something most fans don’t want to acknowledge, especially during a football game. In short, Kaepernick took a page from Bill Russell’s activist athlete playbook. As Russell noted in 1964, “We have got to make the white population uncomfortable, because that is the only way to get their attention.”
At the height of his career, Russell embodied the activist athlete. He boycotted games to protest Jim Crow, and he traveled to murderous Mississippi to join civil rights activists. When asked if he would quit playing basketball to join the movement, he stated, “Yes, but only if it would make a concrete contribution. There’d be no choice. It would be the duty of any American to fight for a cause he strongly believes in.” Russell remained with the Celtics, but he continued to dedicate his life to activism. Earlier this week, he knelt in support of Kaepernick while wearing his Presidential Medal of Freedom.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
During a White House speech on Monday, President Trump denounced racism as “evil” after facing two days of bipartisan criticism for declining to specifically condemn Nazis and white supremacists after a violent rally Charlottesville.
After a nonspecific response Saturday in which the president decried the violence exhibited on “many sides,” he addressed the problem head-on Monday. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to all that we hold dear as Americans.”
Trump’s initial hesitancy to call out white racism did not go unnoticed, and it has similarities with a longstanding trend on Trump’s Twitter account: In his eight years on Twitter, he has been far more likely to accuse African Americans of racism than white people.
Trump has used the word “racist” or “racism” at least 56 times on Twitter, according to the Trump Twitter Archive, a website that tracks and archives all the president’s tweets. In two-thirds of those Tweets, Trump levied accusations of racism at individuals or groups of people. And those accusations followed a very clear pattern: Trump has directed accusations of racism toward black people three times as often as he has done so against whites.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When Stuart Hall died in 2014, he was one of England’s best-known intellectuals, celebrated for his pioneering writings in cultural studies, a field he helped invent along with Raymond Williams, and for his work as a spokesman of the New Left. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. described him as “the Du Bois of Britain,” and The Guardian called him the “godfather of multiculturalism.” During the six decades he lived in England, Hall appeared regularly on TV and radio (including on his own BBC series about the history of the Caribbean), popularized the term “Thatcherism,” co-wrote an influential book on race and policing, and helped found The New Left Review.
Hall took a more expansive view of popular culture than the previous generations of British leftists, who tended to deride it as a monolithic means by which the working-classes were subjected to upper-class hegemony. He saw pop culture as a field of struggle, which held the potential to bring about positive change, rather than simply oppression. As his thinking evolved, he came to insist on a larger vision of politics, one that ventured beyond traditional actors and institutions into more subjective realms. Politics, he argued, was not simply a matter of elections: Politics was everywhere, present in everything from soccer games to soap operas. “The conditions of existence,” he once remarked in an interview are “cultural, political and economic”—in that order.
Despite this reputation, Hall’s legacy was far from assured by the time he died. By 2014, his only single-author book had fallen out of print, and his essays were scattered across obscure journals and anthologies. In the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton admonished Hall for his “frenetic recycling of theories in the realm of culture,” calling him “less an original thinker than a brilliant bricoleur, an imaginative reinventor of other people’s ideas.” Only recently have American publishers attempted to revive his legacy. Duke has launched a book series dedicated to his collected writings, edited by Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz, as well as publishing a collection of essays by David Scott, a cultural anthropologist at Columbia who is working on a biography of Hall. Harvard is publishing a trifecta of lectures Hall delivered at the university in 1994; MIT is releasing an anthology of essays about his work, and Routledge is putting out a conversation between Hall and bell hooks.
These efforts are well-timed: Hall’s work has become especially resonant as Britain has voted for a narrower identity and a more isolationist attitude to the rest of the world. Because of his own ancestry as “part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese-Jew,” Hall always saw identity as pluralistic, and rejected the notion that a person was strictly “English” or “Jamaican.” Towards the end of his life, Hall came to believe that the intransigence of cultural differences would not be able to mesh neatly with the government and conservative media’s increasing demands for “Britishness.” This was partly because of the “regressive modernization” Hall saw under Thatcher—which has echoes in Brexit and Donald Trump—but also because of the imaginative failure on the other side of the political divide; the way the left simply accepted a conservative vision of the world as the consensus on reality.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY’S PORCH