Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Marjorie Stewart Joyner (October 24, 1896 – December 27, 1994) was an American businesswoman. She was born in 1896, in Monterey, Virginia. She was the granddaughter of a white slave owner and a slave. In 1912, she moved to Chicago and began studying cosmetology. She graduated A.B. Molar Beauty School in Chicago in 1916, the first African American to achieve this. There she met Madam C. J. Walker, an African American beauty entrepreneur, and the owner of a cosmetic empire. Always an advocate of beauty for women, Joyner went to work for her and oversaw 200 of Madame Walker's beauty schools as the national adviser. A major role was sending Walker's hair stylists door-to-door, dressed in black skirts and white blouses with black satchels containing a range of beauty products that were applied in the customer's house. Joyner taught some 15,000 stylists over her fifty-year career. She was also a leader in developing new products, such as her permanent wave machine. She helped write the first cosmetology laws for the state of Illinois, and founded both a sorority and a national association for black beauticians. Joyner was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, and helped found the National Council of Negro Women. She was an advisor to the Democratic National Committee in the 1940s, and advised several New Deal agencies trying to reach out to black women. Joyner was highly visible in the Chicago black community, as head of the Chicago Defender Charity network, and fundraiser for various schools. In 1987 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington opened an exhibit featuring Joyner's permanent wave machine and a replica of her original salon.
In 1939, she started looking for an easier way for black women to straighten their hair, taking her inspiration from a pot roast cooking with paper pins to quicken preparation time. Joyner experimented initially with these paper rods and soon designed a table that could be used to curl or straighten hair by wrapping it on rods above the person's head and then cooking them to set the hair.
This method allowed hairstyles to last several days. At the beginning of her invention was to complain that it was uncomfortable. That is when Marjorie improved it with the simple idea of having a scalp protector while the lady is curling her hair. Her patent for this design, (U.S. pat. #1,693,515) established her as the first African American woman to receive a patent. This claim is disputed by some who say that Sarah E. Goode was the first African American woman to hold a patent.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In October 2017, Foreign Policy discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) counterterrorism division had dreamed up a name for people who fight for Black liberation: Black Identity Extremists (BIE). The agency’s report on this so-called group says that, “BIEs have historically justified and perpetuated violence against law enforcement.”
Now, documents obtained by Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that the agency’s intelligence collection on Black activists goes far beyond what was suspected.
From a briefing guide on the collected documents:
Color of Change (COC), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Kramer Law Clinic are currently litigating under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to uncover how the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are monitoring and surveilling public protests regarding police violence, racial justice and the Movement for Black Lives. Between May and December of 2017, DHS and the FBI turned over hundreds of pages of emails, reports, policies and surveillance documents to us.
While many of these documents were fully or partially redacted, it is clear from their substance that the FBI and DHS (including their sub-agencies) are surveilling the Movement for Black Lives, and Black activists and organizers, reinforcing a law enforcement narrative that broadly criminalizes Black protestors.
The documents were obtained via a lawsuit filed against the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI back in October 2016. Among them was a completely blacked-out, nine-page documentthat agency correspondence referred to as the “Race Paper.”
From a briefing guide on the Race Paper:
The DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) produced several emails sent in early 2017 between their personnel concerning a document they referred to as “the Race Paper.” Each email attached a separate version of the document, and some emails contain some feedback from DHS personnel on the structure of the document, call for in-person meetings to discuss the paper, and expressly mention “drivers” and “indicators.”
All versions of the “Race Paper” itself were produced to us, but in completely redacted form—nothing, not even the official title of the document, is visible. DHS claims the document is exempt from release to the public under certain statutes. Considering the documents are all fully black[ed] out, we are thus left to speculate, as to why DHS would prepare a document it refers to only as “the Race Paper” and then closely guard its contents, even to the point of concealing its actual title and a basic description.
The plaintiffs in the suit filed a motion for a summary judgement yesterday (March 19), asking the court to compel DHS to release the full contents of the document.
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Police killings of unarmed black men helped fuel the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Now a new tragedy — the shooting death of an unarmed black man in his own backyard — is raising new questions about how much things have changed, if at all.
On Sunday, 22-year-old Stephon Clark was shot in the backyard of the home he was staying in with his grandparents. Police officers were purportedly responding to reports of a man breaking car windows.
According to a press release issued by the Sacramento Police Department, a helicopter tracking a suspect directed the officers to Clark, who ran towards the house after being confronted by officers. The police department said Clark turned and began to “advance forward with his arms extended, and holding an object in his hands.”
The officers, who are said to have thought the object was a gun, then fired 20 rounds at Clark. It’s unclear how many of the shots hit Clark, but other facts aren’t in dispute, and they’re disturbing: After the shooting, officers waited several minutes for backup before moving to handcuff Clark and beginning medical treatment. And the only item he turned out to have been carrying was a cellphone.
The shooting has sparked public outcry both locally and nationally. And, nearly four years after the death of Michael Brown sparked the rise of Black Lives Matter and brought more attention to racial disparities in police shootings, the Clark case serves as a stark reminder that even as national attention has waned, unarmed black men and women continue to experience deadly encounters with police.
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Comic book author Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez celebrates his fellow Puerto Ricans with a new comic anthology that features his original superhero, La Borinqueña, fighting to rebuild the island.
Miranda-Rodriguez announced the May 23 release of “Ricanstruction: Reminiscing & Rebuilding Puerto Rico” in a tweet yesterday (March 20):
Miranda-Rodriguez populates “Ricanstruction” with personal stories and takes on La Borinqueña from various comic creators of color and Latinx celebrities. Comic author Gabby Rivera, actress Rosario Dawson and novelist Esmerelda Santiago all feature among the list of contributors.
Several of the featured stories will partner La Borinqueña with Wonder Woman, Batman, The Flash and other DC Comics superheroes as they embarck on adventures that improve Puerto Rico. Others will address Puerto Rico’s past and a hopeful future of recovery from the damages of Hurricane Maria and other threats to its self-sufficiency. The New York Times reported yesterday that Santiago contributed a story about her grandfather surviving another hurricane in 1928. All of the stories will highlight the island’s rich history and culture.
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Movie buffs aren’t the only ones in for a treat at the Tribeca Film Festival, as the organization behind the annual event announced Wednesday a wealth of television projects joining the 2018 lineup.
Among the series premiering at this year’s festival is JAY-Z’s Trayvon Martin docuseries Rest In Power: The Trayvon Martin Story, which offers a “definitive look at one of the most talked-about, controversial events of the last decade.” Martin’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, will speak to the audience after a screening of the Paramount Network production.
Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, Martin’s parents, will talk to the audience after the screening. The docuseries is based on their book, Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin.
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The ability to opt out of a neighborhood school increases the likelihood that a black or Hispanic neighborhood will see an influx of wealthier residents. The Atlantic: School Choice May Be Accelerating Gentrification
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When Francis Pearman was studying at Vanderbilt, he and a fellow graduate student noticed a striking phenomenon in Nashville: White, affluent families were moving into low-income neighborhoods without sending their children to the neighborhood schools.
“We were really curious to see what that relationship looked like at the national level,” said Pearman, now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
When he and that student, Walker Swain, looked at national data, a pattern emerged. The ability to opt out of the neighborhood school increased the likelihood that a mostly black or Hispanic neighborhood would see an influx of wealthier residents.
“As school choice expands, the likelihood that low-income communities of color experience gentrification increases,” Pearman said.
Their finding adds to the already-contentious policy debates over school choice, gentrification, and segregation. And now another study, focusing on Charlotte, North Carolina, has come to similar conclusions: Housing prices spiked in areas where students were given new ability to switch schools away from one deemed failing.
“What is remarkable in this moment is that schooling and housing are decoupled in a way that hasn’t been the case before,” said Carla Shedd, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, who has written about school choice and housing.
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Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children.
White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households.
Even when children grow up next to each other with parents who earn similar incomes, black boys fare worse than white boys in 99 percent of America. And the gaps only worsen in the kind of neighborhoods that promise low poverty and good schools.
According to the study, led by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, income inequality between blacks and whites is driven entirely by what is happening among these boysand the men they become. Though black girls and women face deep inequality on many measures, black and white girls from families with comparable earnings attain similar individual incomes as adults.
“You would have thought at some point you escape the poverty trap,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and an author of the study.
Black boys — even rich black boys — can seemingly never assume that.
The study, based on anonymous earnings and demographic data for virtually all Americans now in their late 30s, debunks a number of other widely held hypotheses about income inequality. Gaps persisted even when black and white boys grew up in families with the same income, similar family structures, similar education levels and even similar levels of accumulated wealth.
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Boko Haram has released more than 100 of the schoolgirls it abducted last month, returning them to their village in north-east Nigeria.
Waving the black and white flag used by the Islamic State and wearing balaclavas, military fatigues and ammunition belts, members of the group released most of the girls they had abducted in Dapchi early on Wednesday morning.
On 19 February armed militants pretending to be soldiers herded the girls into trucks and escaped. The Nigerian government was initially slow to act but then said it would negotiate with the group for the girls. It has denied any ransoms were paid.
Witnesses said the militants pulled up near Dapchi police station on Wednesday and shouted that parents should pick up their daughters. Initially, villagers ran away fearing another attack. But when they realised what was happening, they began to cheer and wave at the militants, chasing after their pickup trucks, some recording videos on their phones.
“Dapchi is full of joy,” said Mohammed Mdada, who saw the girls being whipped as they were driven away a month previously. He said the militants apologised to some of the girls’ parents in their language, Kanuri, and shook their hands before driving off.
“They said that if they knew they were Muslim girls they wouldn’t have abducted them,” Mdada said. “They warned the girls that they should stay away from school and swore that if they came back and found any girl in school, they’d abduct them again and never give them back.”
One of the goals of Boko Haram – which has kidnapped thousands of girls, boys and women, forcing some of them to blow themselves up, killed thousands of others and displaced millions – is to stop children receiving what it perceives as western-style education.
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