Commentary: African American Scientists, Explorers and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Theodore Roosevelt Mason "T. R. M." Howard (March 4, 1908 – May 1, 1976) was a Civil Rights leader, entrepreneur and surgeon. He also helped mentor activists such as Medgar Evers, Charles Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, and Jesse Jackson. Howard founded Mississippi's leading civil rights organization in the 1950s, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership; and played a prominent role in the investigation of the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. He was also president of the National Medical Association, chairman of the board of the National Negro Business League, and a leading national advocate of black businesses.
Howard was born in 1908 in Murray, Kentucky to Arthur Howard, a tobacco twister, and Mary Chandler, a cook for Will Mason a prominent local white doctor and member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Dr. Mason took note of the boy's work habits, talent, ambition, and charm. He put him to work in his hospital and eventually paid for much of his medical education. Howard later showed his gratitude by adding Mason as one of his middle names.
Because inpatient care was nonexistent for most African-Americans in Mississippi, several black fraternal organizations built and staffed their own hospitals. One of these, the Taborian Hospital, was established in the all black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1942.
Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, MD, arrived as Chief Surgeon of the Taborian Hospital in 1947. Howard was not only a surgeon but also an entrepreneur, orator, politician, big game hunter, and “raconteur”. His enterprises included a thousand-acre plantation, a home construction firm, an insurance company, the first swimming pool for blacks in Mississippi, a restaurant with a beer garden, a small zoo, and a hospital that gave affordable care to tens of thousands.
He angered whites by his success, flamboyant lifestyle, and outspoken civil rights activism. With Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Aaron Henry, he organized the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in 1951 and sponsored visits to Mississippi by black leaders and celebrities unpopular with whites.
In 1954, Howard hatched a plan to fight a credit squeeze by the White Citizens Councils against civil rights activists in Mississippi. At his suggestion, the NAACP under Roy Wilkins encouraged businesses, churches, and voluntary associations to transfer their accounts to the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis. In turn, the bank made funds available for loans to victims of the economic squeeze in Mississippi.
In 1955, he took up the cause of Emmett Till, who was lynched and thrown into the Tallahatchie River because he wolf-whistled at a white woman. Howard decried “the slaughtering of Negros in Mississippi,” financed a private investigation of Till’s murder, and joined Eleanor Roosevelt and Adam Clayton Powell at a rally in support of Till at Madison Square Garden.
He denounced the investigation of Till by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and provoked a public rebuke from J. Edgar Hoover. By this time, he had turned his mansion into an armed fortress, complete with a Thompson machine gun,and traveled with armed bodyguards.
When the local authorities put Milam and Bryant on trial for murder in September, Howard turned his home into a refuge for Till’s mother (Mamie Till Bradley), black reporters, and witnesses, several of whom he had helped to track down. Every day, he escorted Bradley to the trial in an armed caravan.
In the end, none of it really mattered. On Sept. 23, an all-white jury deliberated for an hour and a half before finding the defendants not guilty. According to one of the jurors, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.”
Howard was not surprised. Shortly before the verdict, he had predicted that “a white man in Mississippi will get no more of a sentence for killing a black person as he would for killing a deer out of season.”
Greenville newspaper editor Hodding Carter wrote that he would not gamble on Howard’s survival much longer in the Delta. In the final months of 1955, Howard and his family were increasingly subjected to death threats and economic pressure. He sold most of his property and moved permanently to Chicago.
Howard helped to found the Chicago League of Negro Voters. The League generally opposed the Daley organization and promoted the election of black candidates in both parties. It nurtured the black independent movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which eventually propelled four of Howard's friends to higher office: Ralph Metcalfe, Charles Hayes, and Gus Savage to Congress, and Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago.
In the two decades after the 1958 election, Howard had little role as a national leader, but he remained important locally. He chaired a Chicago committee in 1965 to raise money for the children of the recently assassinated black leader, Malcolm X. Later, he was an early contributor to the Chicago chapter of the SCLC's Operation Breadbasket under Jesse Jackson. In 1971, Operation PUSH was founded in Howard's Chicago home, and he chaired the organization's finance committee.
Through this period, he became well known as a leading abortion provider, although the procedure was still illegal until 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that women had a right to this procedure. He was arrested in 1964 and 1965 for allegedly performing abortions in Chicago but was never convicted. Howard regarded this work as complementary to his earlier civil rights activism.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A white woman in the Upper West Side area of New York City is entering a state of online virality after being filmed calling the police on a black woman for no reason at all, even at one point claiming to authorities that she was being attacked, despite that not being the case.
The woman — identified in @_brownsugarbaby's original post as Svitlana Flom (more on that in a minute) — is seen on the phone giving police varying versions of the same vague story. As the Instagram user who shot the footage explains, however, she was simply minding her own business when Flom placed a call to the authorities because "she THOUGHT I was smoking in public."
By the third call to authorities, she said, Flom was falsely accusing the woman of threats against her and her children while feigning distress.
"How you come over here just feeling sooooo privileged & soooo comfortable enough to tell me I should leave?" @_brownsugarbaby said in the caption. "You're buggin ... She wanted to be a victim soooo bad!"
Ultimately, police did arrive, though they (fortunately) declined to do anything. In one clip, Flom is seen asking the woman to accompany her to meet the responding officers. "If Bozo was a person, it would be you," the woman says in response to this request.
Svitlana Flom, as stated in the post, is said to be the same Svitlana Flom behind @artdefete, a "lifestyle entertaining expert" account that’s now set to private. Furthermore, her apparent husband is Gary Flom, who's named in Getty Images uploads of years past as the president and CEO of Jaguar Land Rover Manhattan.
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On the third floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., one photograph in particular stands out amid the generally august and serious portraits. While the image looks like it could have been taken at a hip-hop slumber party, the four women laughing in the photo are pioneers: rappers Missy Elliott, Lil’ Kim, Da Brat and the late singer Aaliyah, posing together 21 years ago to celebrate their chart reign and newfound music-industry power. And while there was no shortage of women who achieved successful solo careers in the ’90s, these four dominated in the most masculine genre of all.
Two decades later, Elliott — who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019 — and Kim are largely resting on their musical laurels; Aaliyah tragically died in a 2001 plane crash at the age of just 22.
But Da Brat, whose 1994 album “Funkdafied” made her the first female rapper to go platinum, is getting more airtime than ever — four hours a day, five days a week — now that she’s crossed over from artist to radio personality and joined the nationally syndicated “Rickey Smiley Morning Show” in Atlanta. On top of that, every weekday afternoon she’s in front of the cameras as a co-host of Fox’s syndicated “Dish Nation,” and she serves as executive producer of WE tv’s reality show “Growing Up Hip-Hop Atlanta,” having joined the cast in 2017 when the show debuted. This fall, she’s scheduled to tour the country in “Set It Off,” the stage production of the beloved 1996 female heist movie that starred Vivica Fox, Jada Pinkett and Queen Latifah (tickets are being sold for a planned Sept. 25 start in New Orleans).
In it, Brat plays the lesbian character, Cleo, which was originated by Latifah and suits Brat for a number of reasons. “I love being a badass, and I love being a part of an ensemble of women,” she says. Writer and director Je’Caryous Johnson (“Whatever She Wants,” “For Love or Money”) gushes, “She was my first choice — I couldn’t think of another soul who could do this role — and it’s going to enhance the opportunities for Brat in acting: When we come to L.A., a lot of studio people will be in the house to see her brilliant performance. She has raw talent along with work ethic — the girl gets up at four in the morning for her radio show, then goes to tape ‘Dish Nation’ and she comes straight to rehearsal staying until 10 or 11. She is literally working around the clock.”
The role fits Brat, 46, for another reason: She came out publicly in March, confirming her relationship with Kaleidoscope Hair Products CEO Jesseca Dupart via a tearful Instagram post celebrating an early birthday gift (a white Bentley, complete with a red bow). It’s a move that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of Brat’s career.
While people had long speculated and made assumptions, “the social landscape was very different when she first came on the scene,” noted African American-focused website The Grio. “Both misogyny and homophobia created a culture where coming out would have been career suicide for a Black woman in hip-hop.” Now, industry insiders are buzzing about other female hip-hop pioneers who might be inspired to follow Brat’s example.
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As Donald Trump hid in a bunker on Sunday watching this weekend’s protests, he repeatedly blamed the violence and property damage on antifa. Not only did he use every opportunity to invoke the name of the dreaded bogeyman, he even vowed to designate them a terror organization, which he has threatened to do before.
Aside from the fact that national security experts have almost assuredly informed the president that the distinguishing feature of the loose confederation of anti-fascists is that they are not an organization, Trump continues to trumpet this alternative fact while explicitly excusing the white supremacists who have played a part in instigating chaos.
Still, Trump’s allies have latched on to this claim without any proof, which is not surprising. The same people who spent years demanding that Barack Obama provide documentation proving he was not raised in Kenya by a pack of al-Qaida wolves are willing to ignore reports by special prosecutors, whistleblowers and academics. Instead, they know who’s attacking their beloved country:
That myth was destroyed on Tuesday when Twitter announced it had suspended an account that people had been retweeting as an example of antifa’s diabolical plan to destroy America, as Axios reported:
Twitter said Monday that it has suspended an account named “ANTIFA_US” which it says was tied to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa. Over the weekend, the account had called for violence and its posts had widely circulated online.
Why it matters: It’s the latest example of social media being used to exploit and sharpen the very real divisions in American society. It’s also the latest example of Twitter more aggressively rooting out false information on its platform.
“This account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts,” a Twitter representative told Axios. “We took action after the account sent a Tweet inciting violence and broke the Twitter Rules.”
Twitter has previously taken action on other fake accounts linked to the Identity Evropa group, including ones engaged in targeted hate focused on race, religion and sexual orientation.
Let’s be clear, anti-fascists and anarchists are not the same thing. To be fair, some anti-fascists are anarchists. Some are social justice activists. Some are Christian missionaries. While they don’t really carry membership cards, the only distinguishing feature of the people in the anti-fascist movement is that they are against fascism.
But wait, there’s more.
Twitter also removed two hashtags from its “trending topics” section after “hundreds of spammy accounts” spread the hashtag #BlackoutDC and #DCBlackout, insinuating that the police were jamming cell phone signals at protest sites to discourage sharing information, according to NPR and NBC. While both lies were disputed by journalists on the ground, it was hard to believe those reports after propagandist Max Blumenthal started a rumor that a man was posing as a CNN reporter but was actually an undercover police officer. Of course, it wasn’t true.
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American criminal justice isn’t one system with massive racial disparities but two distinct regimes,” writes MSNBC host Chris Hayes in his book, A Colony in a Nation. “One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.”
A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Roge Karma
The story we’re often told about the American founding is one of a rebellion against unjust taxation. You tell a very different story in the book. To what extent were the founding fathers rebelling against a version of police brutality?
Chris Hayes
Obviously the American Revolution was complicated. But I think in the telling of that history we focus on taxation and not the means through which taxes were collected. Taxation then meant tariffs applied to goods that were being imported or exported. And the way that tariffs were collected at the time was customs enforcement, which is essentially policing. Officials would literally search the ships for how much tobacco or whiskey was on board.
That creates what I call in the book “the first generation of stop and frisk.” The British start pulling over every ship. And when they crack down, it’s oppressive and tyrannical. That’s why in the Declaration of Independence’s bill of particulars against the king, you get the line: “He has sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” That’s basically referring to British cops.
At one point, the Crown realizes that normal customs officials aren’t enough, so they start sending British naval officers. This was a huge deal at the time. It’s a reason that we have these protections against search and seizure in the Bill of Rights. There are these huge trials over this. There’s tons of looting. Customs officers, when they tried to see the ship, would be met by crowds at the dock. They would grab the officers. They would tar and feather them. They would lock them up. They’d wheelbarrow them through town to beat them up in front of everyone. And those were the police at the time.
Revolutions are complicated, but this slice of it was a rebellion very actively triggered by the brutality and oppressiveness of the crown’s policing power. It’s something that we aren’t often taught, but it is there, plain as day.
Roge Karma
In the book, you distinguish between two very different policing and criminal justice regimes in modern America: “the Nation,” which is governed under the logic of democracy and “the Colony,” which is governed under the logic of occupation. What exactly is “the Colony” in this analysis and what are some of the ways is it governed as such?
Chris Hayes
“The Colony” in some ways is the absence of accountability and consent of the governed, which defines a nation and defines a culture of democratic policing. I keep thinking about this moment on the steps in California during one of the shutdown protests where a bunch of very rowdy protesters are getting in the faces of cops pushing them, yelling in their faces — and the cops just sort of hold their ground.
When you see that, what you see is police policing people that are their constituents in one sense and in a grander sense are their “bosses.” These are people who are angry, but they are engaged in constitutionally-protected protest, and the police are there to keep the peace but not dominate them. That’s the model of democratic policing.
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Race has been at the center of the long and circuitous struggle for gender justice since Sojourner Truth made the intersectional declaration “Ain’t I A Woman” at a Women’s Rights conference in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. The recent FX/ Hulu mini-series, “Mrs. America,” that concluded this week, chronicles one chapter in that long history: the decade long fight for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s, and the issue of Black women’s representation warrants both recognition and criticism. “Mrs. America” gives a tepid nod to inclusivity by incorporating the stories of women like Black Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and radical lawyer-activist, Flo Kennedy, but it ultimately errs more to the right than the left and marginalizes Black feminism yet again.
The nine-part mini-series, which ended on May 27, focuses on six prominent women from the era, notably Feminine Mystique author, Betty Friedan and Ms. Magazine founder, Gloria Steinem, along with the right-wing anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly. Portrayed by Cate Blanchett, Schlafly gets far too much screen time, minimizing the breadth of Black and Latinx women’s activism in this period and shortchanging viewers in the process.
Series creator Dahvi Waller, admitted in an Esquire interview that she herself had not even heard of Chisholm until the 2008 election. However, to Waller’s credit, she devotes one of “Mrs. America’s” episodes to Chisholm’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972. It is a lesser-known chapter in U.S. political history but one that resonates today in many ways. Before Barack Obama’s historic presidential victory, there was Rev. Jesse Jackson’s primary campaigns in 1984 and 1988. But before both of them there was Shirley Chisholm, who also paved the way for recent women presidential aspirants, but with radical, as opposed to liberal, politics. Chisholm, whose campaign slogan was “unbought and unbossed,” confronted the smug racism of the Democratic party elites that sought to marginalize her by calling for a “bloodless revolution” at the party’s Miami convention. As Chisholm’s biographer Barbara Winslow writes, “Her feminism was connected to all contemporary social issues: ending the war in Vietnam, abolishing poverty, opposing racialized police and state violence, expansion of social welfare programs including education, day care and healthcare,” and women’s reproductive freedom. Chisholm also welcomed the endorsement of the Black Panther Party, even though some of her more mainstream advisors warned against it.
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“We cannot continue to be in partnership with an organization that has the culture of violence and racism that the Minneapolis police department has historically demonstrated,” board member. Color Lines: Minneapolis Board of Ed Unanimously Votes to Remove Police From Public Schools
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The Minneapolis Board of Education (MBOE) voted unanimously on Tuesday (June 2) to end their contract with the local police department in the wake of George Floyd’s death, The Guardian reports. “We cannot continue to be in partnership with an organization that has the culture of violence and racism that the Minneapolis police department has historically demonstrated,” school board member Nelson Inz said of the decision. “We have to stand in solidarity with our Black students.”
The approved resolution has been a long time coming for Black, Latinx and Indigenous Minneapolis Public School (MPS) students. The now terminated contract had been in place since 1980, according to local news outlet MPLS St. Paul, and employed “16 police officers in schools, who are called Student Resource Officers (SROs),” most recently with a $1 million budget.
Rayna Acha, a student organizer with Young People’s Action Coalition (YPAC), described by MPLS as “an independent, entirely youth-run organization addressing social justice issues at a systemic level,” told the news outlet her group had been trying to get police removed from their schools years before Floyd’s murder. “A few months ago, [YPAC was] really losing hope and felt like we weren’t getting anywhere with police presence in schools. [The board] has heard us and seen us, and gotten calls from us,” she told MPLS. “It’s upsetting that people have to see someone be murdered in the street to take serious action. That makes it feel like student voices weren’t enough.”
“It is deeply frustrating that the MPS board needed to see a Minneapolis police officer brutally murder George Floyd in order to finally make the change that students have been demanding for years,” Kenneth Eban of student advocacy group Our Turn Twin Cities said in a statement obtained by MPLS.
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João Pedro Matos Pinto was young, gifted and black, and he died last month with an assault rifle shot to his back.
“He had dreams. He wanted to be a top lawyer,” said Neilton da Costa Pinto, the father of the Brazilian teenager, whose shooting during a botched police raid has drawn comparisons to the killing of George Floyd, 9,000km north in Minneapolis.
“He always used to say: ‘Dad, one day I’ll make you proud’,” remembered Pinto, a driver from São Gonçalo, a city just east of Rio. “And I’d say: ‘I’ve no doubt about it, son.’ Because he was such a dedicated boy. He really knew what he wanted in life.”
João Pedro, who was 14, was far from the first young black Brazilian man to meet a premature death at the hands of the police. Thousands have been killed in recent years – and 75% of the victims were black.
But his killing has sparked an unusually loud public outcry, amid growing fury over an upsurge in deadly police violence that continues unabated despite a government-ordered shutdown designed to combat Covid-19.
On Sunday, demonstrators will march for the second time in a week to denounce the police assaults on the favelas and what they call a state-sponsored “genocide” of Brazil’s black youth.
“This must stop,” said João Pedro’s father. “The police should be protecting us, not killing us.”
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The story of mobile money is one that turns during crises. In Kenya in 2008, violence broke out after a disputed election the year before. As supporters of the rival candidates clashed on the streets, ordinary folk were afraid to go out. Many started sending money to each other by phone using a newfangled service called m-Pesa. The habit stuck. Today m-Pesa is the most celebrated mobile-money service in the world. It processes 11bn transactions a year and has spawned imitators across Africa and farther afield.
Could covid-19 have a similar catalytic effect in other countries? In Rwanda the number of mobile-money transfers doubled in the week after a lockdown was imposed in March, according to data collected by the telecommunications regulator and analysed by Cenfri, a South African think-tank. By late April users were making 3m transactions a week, five times the pre-pandemic norm (see chart). The value of transfers between individuals had risen six-fold to 40bn Rwandan francs ($42m).
The data do not show what caused the spike. Maybe Rwandans switched to digital payments because restrictions on movement made it hard to use cash; perhaps they were sending help to loved ones in need. A third explanation is that official policy changed. Just before the lockdown, the central bank told telecoms companies to eliminate charges on all mobile-money transfers for a three-month period. It also raised transaction limits.
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The man tasked with promoting black culture by Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been recorded describing the country’s black rights movement as “scum”.
Sérgio Camargo, a fervent Bolsonarista whose appointment as the head of Brazil’s Palmares Cultural Foundation last year caused outrage, made the comments at the end of April, according to a recording obtained by the Estado de São Paulo newspaper.
“The black movement, those bums from the black movement, bloody scum,” Camargo can be heard saying during a conversation about a mobile phone that had supposedly gone missing from the foundation’s headquarters.
At another point Camargo calls the anti-slavery resistance hero Zumbi a “filho da puta” (son of a bitch) and dismisses Brazil’s annual Black Consciousness Day as “a joke”, vowing to abolish funding for its events.
Flávia Oliveira, one of Brazil’s best-known black journalists, said activists were preparing legal action to push for an investigation and for Camargo’s removal.
“It is truly lamentable that the debate over such an important issue ... is in the hands of someone so unfit,” Oliveira told GloboNews.
Camargo, who describes himself as a “rightwing black man”, has an ignominious track record of slurring black artists and activists.
He once called one of Brazil’s most celebrated samba composers, Martinho da Vila, a “bum” who should “be sent to the Congo” and branded the American civil rights activist Angela Davis a “minger” and “hag”.
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