Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
It’s with sadness I have to announce that Sephius1 is stepping down from Black Kos. Due to his work schedule he has only been able to write and not participate for the past 18 months. He has given me his science links and I’ll try to continue on in his tradition. Thank you sephius for helping to make Black Kos, what it is today.
dopper0189
Marian R. Croak (1955 - ) has contributed to the expansion of technology, especially Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), throughout her career. Croak attended the University of California and Princeton University, graduating with a Ph.D. in Qualitative Analysis and Social Psychology in 1982.
Little is known about the early life of Marian R. Croak. She was born in 1955 in Pennsylvania and has spoken about how her father was often an influence in her success in that throughout her childhood, he pushed her to pursue her passion for science through as many creative ways as possible, such as building a chemistry lab in their home.
In 1982, Dr. Croak joined AT&T Bell Laboratories where she served in various positions until September 2014. Within her positions, Dr. Croak completed a variety of assignments, including working with voice and data communication. Dr. Croak holds over 200 patents in several areas but the majority are in VOIP, where she has received about 100 patents. With this technology, Dr. Croak has helped advance technology, including calling and text messaging on cellular phones. Dr. Croak also has more patents which are under review. Altogether, Dr. Croak has applied for and been granted over 350 patents.
Throughout her career, Dr. Croak worked her way up the ladder within AT&T Bell Laboratories. Among her positions, she held the title of Vice President of the Services Network in Research and Development. In this position, Dr. Croak was responsible for over 200 programs dealing with AT&T’s wireline and wireless services. She was also supervisor to over 500 world-class engineers and computer scientists, who would help Dr. Croak run the programs.
Read more here ->
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington gave his famous address to the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. Washington declared before this regional business gathering his acquiescence in the name of the black Southern population to the new regime of almost total black disfranchisement and the abrogation of civil rights within a social, political, and economic order based on explicit racial subordination. The speech offered the architects of the new segregationist order a beguiling metaphor to rationalize their efforts; the races would now work, Washington vowed, “separate as the fingers … one as the hand” in the restlessly improving spirit of free enterprise. He also exhorted black and white Southerners to “cast down your buckets where you are” in the region—an appeal that offered white employers tractable, low-wage black labor and consigned blacks to the most humble opportunities that racial subordination relegated to them.
Washington’s rise to singular prominence as a laissez-faire–minded collaborator with segregation is by now well documented. In debates with other black racial advocates of the time regarding ways forward—the importance of maintaining the franchise and civil rights, broad liberal education, etc.—Washington focused on the accumulation of property and wealth within the boundaries imposed by the regime of white supremacy.
It bears reminding, for example, that Washington and his best-known adversary on this latter question, W.E.B. Du Bois, were not antagonists at the time of the “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Their disagreement over racial strategy—whether to protest open racial subordination or accommodate and find ways to operate within it—had not yet taken shape in 1895, and wouldn’t become a public breach until several years later. Like many in their stratum of would-be race spokesmen and spokeswomen, in the 1890s both men accepted the premise that the black freedpeople were a “child race” in need of tutelage. Even Du Bois’s argument for the franchise in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 was premised on the belief that a chief effect of the vote would be to ratify racial leadership by “men of skill, men of light and leading, college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by force of precept and example.”
Nor was Washington the first person in modern African American life to assume the role of Race Ventriloquist—a self-empowered advocate of strategic compromise seeking to sacrifice blacks’ citizenship rights in the name of one definition or another of “racial peace.” Five years before Washington’s Atlanta speech, Isaiah T. Montgomery, founder of the all-black town, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was the only black delegate to the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention. That infamous body disfranchised the state’s black population and installed white supremacy as the foundation of Mississippi’s legal structure. Montgomery, like Washington, disparaged political activism for blacks other than himself. In 1890, he not only was a convention delegate; he also served on the committee that disfranchised black voters, and he voted for and endorsed disfranchisement from the convention floor. In that address, he purported to lay “the suffrage of 123,000 of my fellow-men at the feet of this Convention” as an “olive branch of peace.”
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Last summer in Ghana, Tiffany Heard followed her guide to his hometown of Kumasi. There, in a courtyard in the country’s second largest city, as locals chanted and sang, the 34-year-old travel planner from California waited for her new name.
The ceremony was simple but significant. Names connect Africans with place and family; the absence of a name represents the absence of a history. When names were taken from slaves, individuals were severed from their ancestry. So for a black American to be named in Ghana was to be reattached to a community.
In front of the Kumasi queen mother, a chief, the elders, and a host of locals, Heard was introduced to her African name: Akua (“Wednesday,” the day of her birth) Konadu (the name of the local family chosen for her to join). The five others in her group each received their own new name.
“It was definitely a special moment for everybody,” says Heard. “To feel like I’ve reconnected, I’ve come back home.”
That reconnection was what Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, had in mind when he announced that 2019 would be a “Year of Return.” The tourism initiative invited black people from across the diaspora to return to the African continent in 2019 to mark the 400 years since slave ships leaving West African coasts had carried their ancestors to the Americas.
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A new documentary, Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution, introduces us to heroes of the American Revolution who aren't typically found in history books. They are a writer, a double agent, a martyr and a soldier — and they are all black.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the executive producer. He is a Hall of Fame basketball player, writer, activist, and in 2016 the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Abdul-Jabbar says he was born and raised in New York City, in "the last part of Manhattan that George Washington controlled before he had to leave and escape and go to Valley Forge," he says. "You know, I read about that incident in my history books, and I was surprised to find out that it happened in in my neighborhood. So after that, you know. My experiences as a child, we often would find like musket balls and arrowheads in the parks. Right there in northern Manhattan. And you know, I felt a real connection to the history of that area."
Interview Highlights
On why we don't know these stories
Well, we don't know the stories already because people who write history books, or who have written most of the history books have focused on what European Americans thought, and what their objectives were, and what they did to make those objectives become real. And anybody who was not European was not seen as being worth depicting, because their stake in it seemed to be non-existent. This nation was founded by white people, for white people. At the time, blacks were not allowed citizenship. Women were not allowed to vote. Native Americans were not allowed citizenship. That's the way it was back in those days.
On the story that had the most impact on him
Well, Peter Salem is absolutely a hero doing a heroic thing at a very crucial time. Peter Salem frustrated the final attempt by the British to take the field [at the Battle of Bunker Hill] by shooting Major Pitcairn, who was an officer in the British army. He shot him before he could gather the troops. The British professional soldiers thought that they could run our side off of the field because, you know, they weren't professional soldiers. But we changed their mind over the period of the Revolutionary War. And in the end, the British had to concede.
There's a painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill and Peter Salem, I think, is in it. He's down in a corner hiding behind the shoulder of one of the white American officers. And you almost don't see him. I think in some in some paintings he's been cropped off. But there's a black soldier there.
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Researchers at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are looking for help from East Tennesseans in order to learn the names and uncover the history of African Americans buried within the park.
Beyond the trails are hundreds of cemeteries, known and unknown. According to the National Park, one cemetery off the trails of Mingus Mill is the final resting place of slaves from the 1800s. Six graves are simply marked with field stones without names.
In the Higdon Family Cemetery in the Hazel Creek area of the park, the GSMNP said you will find a grave simply marked 'A Black Man.'
“It’s sort of hidden in plain sight. A lot of people come up to the Mill and have no idea that it's even here,” researcher Frank March said. “We don’t know who’s buried here. We do know that they were slaves.”
Researchers are hoping to uncover a rich and long-untold history in southern Appalachia through the African American Experience project. However, the project is facing common obstacles: "the African American members of the communities are nameless and faceless in typical historical records."
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The Trump administration might want US troops who have been fighting for years in Western Africa to get out. But a testy argument between the Pentagon and members of Congress over the weekend shows that doing so could be politically difficult for the president.
Back in December, multiple reports indicated Defense Secretary Mark Esper was weighing options for a reduction — or even a complete withdrawal — of US service personnel in West Africa. According to a US Africa Command spokesperson, there are currently approximately 1,200 US personnel (including military personnel, civilians, and contractors) in all of West Africa, the majority in the country of Niger.
The main reason they’re there is to train local military forces to fight terrorist groups. But the US also collects intelligence for itself and to share with others, as well conducts airstrikes against adversaries when American forces deem it necessary.
The Trump administration, though, has its eyes on “great power competition,” meaning preparing the US military and diplomatic corps to confront Russia and China for the long haul. Helping Western African countries deal with their terrorism problems doesn’t really fit that focus. It’s why the Pentagon is thinking about where it’s best to place US troops to meet those and other needs.
“We’ve begun a review process where I’m looking at every theater, understanding what the requirements are that we set out for, making sure we’re as efficient as possible with our forces,” Esper told reporters in December.
The prospect of a withdrawal has worried French President Emmanuel Macron, whose troops lead much of the antiterror fighting in the region. “If the US decided to withdraw from Africa, it would be bad news for us,” he said in a January news conference.
”I would like to be able to convince President Trump that the fight against terrorism to which he is deeply committed is playing out also in this region,” Macron continued.
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Swarms of locusts ravaging crops and grazing land across east Africa have reached South Sudan, already reeling from widespread hunger and years of civil war, the country’s agriculture minister said on Tuesday.
Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea and Djibouti are battling the worst locust outbreak in decades, and swarms have also spread into Tanzania and Uganda.
Desert locusts can travel up to 150km (95 miles) in a day and eat their own body weight in greenery, meaning a swarm just one kilometre square can eat as much food as 35,000 people in a day, according to the United Nations.
The invasion is worsening food shortages in a region where up to 25 million people are suffering after three consecutive years of droughts and floods.
Meshack Malo, South Sudan’s representative for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said the locusts were mature and looking for breeding grounds that would form the basis of the next major infestation.
“These are deep yellow, which means that they will be here mostly looking at areas in which they will lay eggs,” he said.
Teams planned to mark the place where they lay eggs and then come back to kill the young insects in 14 days, he said, since poisoning the eggs in the ground could damage the soil.
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