Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
George Robert Carruthers (born October 1, 1939 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an African American inventor, physicist, and space scientist. He has lived most of his life in Washington, DC.
From a young age he showed an interest in science and astronomy. He grew up in the South Side of Chicago where at the age of 10 he built his first telescope. Despite his natural aptitude, he did not perform well in school at a young age, earning poor grades in math and physics. Despite his poor grades he won three separate science fair awards during this time.
After graduating from Englewood High School he went on to get a bachelors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1961, a master’s degree in nuclear engineering in 1962, and a doctorate in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 1964. He now works with NRL’s community outreach organization, and as such helps support several educational activities in the sciences in the Washington D.C. area.
His work on ultraviolet spectrums and other types of astronautical tools helped him earn the Black Engineer of the Year award, of which he was one of the first 100 people to receive. His work has also been used by NASA, and in 1972 he was one of two naval research laboratory persons whose work culminated in the camera/spectrograph which was put on the moon in April, 1972.
He is perhaps best known for his work with the spectrograph that showed incontrovertible proof that molecular hydrogen exists in the interstellar medium.
George Robert Carruthers was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 1, 1939 and grew up in South Side, Chicago. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a homemaker. The family lived in Milford, Ohio until Carruthers' father died suddenly and his mother moved the family back to her native Chicago. At an early age George developed an interest in physics, which his father encouraged. Also as a child, he enjoyed visiting Chicago museums, libraries and the Adler Planetarium that caused him to be an avid science-fiction reader and enjoyed constructing model rockets. Later he became a member of the Chicago Rocket Society and various science clubs.
In 1957, he earned his high school diploma from Englewood High School. This was the same year that the Russians launched the first Sputnik. After high school he entered to the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, getting his bachelor's of science degree in aeronautical engineering in the year of 1961. He also did his graduate work at the University of Illinois earning his masters degree in nuclear engineering in 1962 and his Ph.D. in aeronautical and astronomical engineering in 1964. While conducting his graduate studies, Carruthers worked as researcher and teaching assistant studying plasma and gases.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Focus has released a first trailer for Harriet, the movie about heroic abolitionist Harriet Tubman, starring Cynthia Erivo (Widows). Pic is directed by Kasi Lemmons from a screenplay she co-wrote with Gregory Allen Howard.
Harriet follows Tubman’s escape from slavery and subsequent missions to free dozens of slaves through the Underground Railroad in the face of growing pre-Civil War adversity.
Leslie Odom Jr., Janelle Monáe, Joe Alwyn, Jennifer Nettles, and Clarke Peters also star. Debra Martin Chase with Martin Chase Productions, Daniela Taplin Lundberg with Stay Gold Features and Gregory Allen Howard produce.
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The last few months have been a whirlwind for four young black businessmen who are quickly becoming superstars in the business investment arena. In a space long dominated by white men, these brothers are carving out a niche that champions investing in businesses owned by women and people of color.
John Henry, a co-founder of Harlem Capital Partners (HCP) team, rushed back from a business meeting on July 16 to sit down with The Root. Earlier that day, Consumer Technology Association announced it had selected HCP as one of two venture capital firms it will invest in as part of its $10 million commitment to minority and women-owned companies. That latest deal came on the heels of Forbes selecting the team for its coveted 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur class of 2019.
HCP is on a mission to level the investment playing field for entrepreneurs of color and women business owners. The partners plan to invest in 1,000 diverse company founders over the next two decades through its early-stage venture capital investments. Investment firms employ mostly white men and invest almost exclusively in companies owned by white men.
Henry, 26, pulled out a research paper that laid out the well-documentedchallenges. Venture capital firms, which invest in startup companies and small businesses that have growth potential, raise billions of dollars each year. However, as one study found, 2.2 percent of VC investments went to businesses operated by women, and even fewer dollars went to women of color.
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The legacy of Jim Crow continues to loom large in the United States. But nowhere is it arguably more evident than in Louisiana. In 1898, a constitutional convention successfully codified a slew of Jim Crow laws in a flagrant effort to disenfranchise black voters and otherwise infringe on their rights. “Our mission was to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done,” wrote Judiciary Committee Chairman Thomas Semmes.
One of these laws sought to maintain white supremacy in state courtrooms. In response to the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which required the state to include black people on juries, Louisiana lawmakers and voters ratified a nonunanimous-jury law. This meant that a split jury—a verdict of 11–1 or 10–2—could convict a defendant to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The law was designed to marginalize black jurors on majority-white juries, and many believe that it has contributed to the state’s status as the prison capital of the world. (Until 2017, Louisiana had the highest incarceration rate in the nation.)
“Nonunanimous juries are a vestige of Jim Crow,” says William Snowden, a member of the Unanimous Jury Coalition, in Sean Mattison’s short documentary Jim Crow’s Last Stand. The rousing film captures the efforts of the group to pass Louisiana Amendment 2, a bipartisan measure on the midterm ballot to eliminate nonunanimous-jury convictions in felony trials. In November, 64 percent of Louisianans voted yes.
“This was a real vindication of all of their hard work, as well as a statewide indictment of a law that had unjustly imprisoned innocent people for over 100 years,” Mattison told me.
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Much of the conversation about school segregation in America is about how to lessen segregation within a school district, ensuring students of all races in the same district can study together in the same school.
That’s the kind of policy Joe Biden opposed in the 1970s, which he was called out for during the first Democratic presidential debates. These policies tried to ban federal courts from forcing districts to bus children from one neighborhood to another to desegregate schools.
But many districts are so segregated that they can’t be integrated just by moving students around within their borders. School district boundaries that draw a sharp line between two separate and unequal districts — one majority-white and well-funded, one nonwhite and underfunded — are quite common in the United States.
Here’s the border that separates two school districts in Connecticut — Lebanon and Windham.
Lebanon is 90 percent white, and it spends about $22,000 per pupil each year. Windham is about 25 percent white, and it spends $3,000 less per pupil than Lebanon.
There are nearly 1,000 borders like this in the US, according to a new report from the education nonprofit EdBuild. It looked for bordering districts where there was at least a 25 percentage-point gap in white students, as well as at least a 10 percent gap in funding.
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Ask most musicians what genre they play and you’ll likely get a prickly response. As one well-known, and slightly tipsy, jazz musician once told me: “If you all stopped obsessing about me playing ‘jazz’, maybe I would be playing festival stages rather than tiny clubs by now.” But while there have been meandering debates about jazz during its long history, another genre has become far more contentious in recent years: world music.
Dreamed up in a London pub in 1987 by DJs, record producers and music writers, it was conceived as a marketing term for the greater visibility of newly popularised African bands, following the success of Paul Simon’s Johannesburg-recorded Graceland the year before. “It was all geared to record shops. That was the only thing we were thinking about,” DJ Charlie Gillett, one of the pub-goers, told the Guardian in 2004. The group raised £3,500 from 11 independent labels to begin marketing “world music”to record stores. “It was the most cost-effective thing you could imagine,” said record producer Joe Boyd. “£3,500 and you get a whole genre – and a whole section of record stores today.”
Founders of the term provided vague justifications for lumping together anything that wasn’t deemed to be from a European or American tradition – “looking at what artists do rather than what they sound like”, as editor of fRoots magazine Ian Anderson said. The World of Music, Arts and Dance Festival, AKA Womad, which was founded seven years before the term gained prominence, similarly used it as a catch-all for its roster of international artists. “There were no other festivals like ours at the time,” artistic programmer Paula Henderson says. “We weren’t pop or rock, so we were happy to advertise it as world when we began.”
But the term soon faced opposition. Talking Heads frontman David Byrne founded the label Luaka Bop, which has released artists who might be placed in the “world” category, including William Onyeabor and Susana Baca. In 1999, he wrote a scathing op-ed in the New York Times called I Hate World Music in which he argued that listening to music from other cultures, “letting it in”, allows for it to change our world view and to reduce what was once exotic into part of ourselves. World music meant the opposite: a distancing between “us” and “them”: “It’s a none too subtle way of reasserting the hegemony of western pop culture,” Byrne wrote. “It ghettoises most of the world’s music. A bold and audacious move, White Man!”
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With a new album, a solo track on Beyoncé’s Lion King compilation, and a global fan base, Burna Boy is pushing the limits imposed on artists from the continent. The Atlantic: The ‘African Giant’ Challenging Musical Boundaries
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In january, when coachella announced the lineup for its annual music festival in California, the Nigerian-born singer Burna Boy—one of only two African artists set to perform—quickly reacted to the placement of his name on the promotional materials. “I really appreciate you,” he wrote in an Instagram Story after the poster reveal. “But I don’t appreciate the way my name is written so small in your bill. I am an AFRICAN GIANT and will not be reduced to whatever that tiny writing means. Fix tings quick please.”
At the time, the Afro-fusion singer’s dramatic response to the perceived slight earned him some light criticism from those (fans included) who thought the Instagram post betrayed an outsized ego, even for a musician. But when Coachella didn’t amend the flyers, Burna Boy doubled down: His label sent press a reimagined festival poster—one that listed his name in place of all the other performers. Soon afterward, he announced the “African Giant” tour and the title of his forthcoming album—you guessed it—African Giant. (Onstage at Coachella in April, he eschewed the ire in favor of crowd-centric ebullience, especially when performing alongside his fellow Nigerian artist Mr Eazi.)
In person, a week before African Giant’s release, Burna Boy carried himself with all the casual bravado his self-appointed nickname suggests. The singer, born Damini Ogulu, leaned back in his seat as we spoke, pausing often to smoke or flash a diamond-encrusted smile. When I asked about the choice to lean in to the grandiose moniker, he was adamant that the name points to something bigger than his own ego: “It’s just something that I consider a fact, [being] No. 1,” the singer said of his musical standing on the continent as we talked in Brooklyn. “An American artist can come to Africa and rap his English rap with his slangs that we don’t even get, but we say it.”
“Why didn’t he change his language to make us understand him better?” Burna asked me, then returned my response—Because Americans aren’t expected to adapt to different audiences—with a reply that I took to be more self-evident than arrogant: “So why do I have to?”
For all of the jokes about Burna’s braggadocio, the Coachella dustup does point to a larger issue: African artists, even those with followings the size of Burna’s and Eazi’s, are continually underestimated and mischaracterized by American music-industry gatekeepers. Coachella, long considered a launching pad for indie artists’ careers, boasts a remarkably diverse array of musicians each year. Even so, Burna and Eazi were its first two Africa-based performers, 20 years into the festival’s existence. (The Nigerian singer Wizkid was slated to appear in 2018, but visa issues kept him from attending.) That delay echoes an industry-wide concern based chiefly on misconceptions about African music.
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