Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Lloyd Albert Quarterman was born in Philadelphia on May 31, 1918. As a young boy he soon discovered his passion for science and spent many hours working with chemistry sets. When he was older during the 1930’s, Quarterman went to college at St. Augustines in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was here that Quarterman not only developed a reputation for science, but also for his abilities on the football field. He earned his bachelors degree in 1943.
Immediately following graduation Quarterman was hired by the United States War Department. He was one of only six African Americans to be involved with research for the atomic bomb. His official title was an assistant to an associate research scientist and chemist. It is not known what his exact duties were because those who worked on the Manhattan Project were sworn to secrecy. Many different teams were involved with the building and completion of the atomic bomb. Quarterman worked on the teams at Columbia University in New York City and at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
It was on this team at the University of Chicago that the atom was first split, creating nuclear fission. Quarterman occasionally worked along side Albert Einstein to help create uranium isotopes. These were necessary for uranium gas, which made fission possible. This project was very secretive and also became known as the plutonium project. It was under this project that the first nuclear reactor, pile, was built. This is the most essential part of modern nuclear power plants. In 1945 when W.W.II ended, Quarterman was recognized with a certificate from the US War Department for helping to bring the war to an end.
This Chicago team became known as Argonne National Laboratories. This lab, funded by the University of Chicago, but no longer secretly, searched for peaceful uses for nuclear energy. Quarterman remained involved with this team for the next 30 years. During this time he also studied quantum mechanics. This helped to strengthen his ability as a scientist. In 1952, because of his dedication and hard work, he earned a Masters of Science from Northwestern University.....Read more here -->
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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When, this past spring, a succession of stories about communities pushing back, angrily, against the supposed teaching of critical race theory in their school districts began to overtake my social media feeds, I had a hunch that it was a direct result of white fear. But a recent data analysis from NBC News confirms it.
Reporters found that the districts hosting some of the most combative debates over diversity and inclusion initiatives—including just teaching about racism—have seen a steady increase in students of color attending its schools. In Gwinnett County, Georgia, where parents have squared off over critical race theory, there has been a 52.4 percent increase in students of color since 1994. And in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the rights of transgender students and teaching racism have become ugly, loud battleground issues, there has been a 29.5 percent increase in that span of time.
If you’ve been following how whiteness has evolved since the 2016 election, this isn’t surprising. But it is nice to have the numbers to back it up. It reminded one of my colleagues of a similar, equally unsurprising yet very real finding following the Capitol riot. Political scientist Robert Pape, after going through polling and demographic data, discovered that most people who participated in the riots came to D.C. from places where residents were terrified of being replaced by people of color and immigrants. More specifically, as the New York Times put it, “counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists.”
“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Pape told the New York Times. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
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"I don't think a moral compass will let you ban books about equality and loving each other," Central York High School senior Christina Ellis told CNN.
Ellis is among the students protesting a book ban in York, Pennsylvania, and questions whether the officials who decided to remove certain reading materials from the curriculum even read the resources they deem controversial. She was joined by other teens protesting in front of Central York High School this week.
On Monday, students, parents and other community members debated during a virtual school board meeting about the list of anti-racism books and resources that were banned from the curriculum by the Central York school board last year.
Last October, the all-White school board unanimously banned a list of educational resources that included a children's book about Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai's autobiography and CNN's Sesame Street town hall on racism.
From
chaotic school board meetings to political strife along party lines, debates about diverse curriculum have ignited controversy across the country in recent months.
And earlier this month, a new Texas law aimed at restricting discussions of race and history in schools had some educators second guessing themselves and forgoing civics-related activities to avoid running afoul of it.
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Tino McFarland grew up watching his family hustle. His grandfather repaired small engines and radiators in a tiny town in northern Mississippi. His dad worked at a factory and moonlit as a handyman. And when McFarland was only 9 years old, he started renting his dad’s lawn mower and weed wacker, marketing his lawn maintenance services to his neighbors.
McFarland decided to end his lawn-mowing endeavor and get a full-time job bagging groceries when his dad sat him down to teach him about entrepreneurship. “He told me, ‘You spent too much renting that mower and weed wacker from me,’” laughs McFarland. “And there was a lesson in it, right? It was about being smart about investments, borrowing and owning your business.”
But there was a bigger lesson, too — one that McFarland would learn again years later, when he and his wife Tamara started McFarland Construction in their townhome’s spare bedroom in Charlotte, North Carolina. McFarland realized that obtaining capital to help a small business get off the ground can be a major barrier for Black and Latinx business owners. “It's an uphill challenge, a systematic thing,” he says. And he’s not alone. According to a report from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Black entrepreneurs are almost three times more likely to have business profits negatively affected by access to capital.
“Starting and growing a small business requires not only ingenuity, hard work and perseverance, but also money,” says Donna Gambrell, chief executive officer of Appalachian Community Capital and the former director of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. “Black- and Latinx-owned small businesses often face obstacles because they lack start-up funding and their families and friends are also often similarly financially constrained.”
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis disproportionately affected Black and Latino businesses and accentuated funding access issues and business development challenges.
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Haiti’s chief prosecutor said on Tuesday that there was evidence linking the acting prime minister to the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, and prohibited him from leaving the country until he answers questions about it.
Last week, the prosecutor issued a police summons for the prime minister, Ariel Henry, requesting that he testify about contact he had with one of the chief suspects in the killing. Phone records show that Mr. Henry spoke with the suspect — Joseph Badio, a former intelligence official — in the hours after Mr. Moïse was killed in July in his home in Port-au-Prince, the capital.
Mr. Henry, who swiftly removed the prosecutor from his post, is by far the most prominent figure to be swept up in a murder investigation that has resulted in the arrest of more than 40 people but has shed little light onto who ordered and paid for the president’s killing — and why.
The detained include Mr. Moïse’s security officers, businessmen, three Haitian Americans and 18 Colombian mercenaries accused of leading the assault on Mr. Moïse’s residence. And the police have issued at least a dozen more arrest warrants, including one for Mr. Badio, whom the Haitian authorities accuse of arming and directing the Colombian mercenaries on the night of the attack.
But as leads grow cold and key suspects vanish, the investigation appears to be descending into a political power struggle. Competing factions of the country’s elite are using Mr. Moïse’s murder to attack opponents, leading many Haitians to fear that they will never see justice done for a crime that has left the nation adrift.
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The UK’s cut to its aid budget comes to about £4bn a year. Such a dramatic reduction is a blow to many, but most of all to the local organisations who perpetually find themselves last in line for funding.
New research by the Vodafone Foundation reveals that, too often, only a small proportion of philanthropic funding earmarked for African development reaches local, African-led civil society organisations. Instead, most development funding favours intermediaries in the global north and international organisations.
Funding that does reach Africa is typically distributed among locally registered international NGO counterparts and then allocated to African-led organisations on a project basis. This limits the scope and flexibility of activities on the ground and promotes aid reliance, instead of durable, transformative change.
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The photographs are about the size of a small hand. They’re wrapped in a leatherette case and framed in gold. From the background of one, the image of a Black woman’s body emerges. Her hair is plaited close to her head, and she is naked from the waist up. Her stare seems to penetrate the glass of the frame, peering into the eyes of the viewer. The paper label that accompanies her likeness reads: delia, country born of african parents, daughter of renty, congo. In another frame, her father stands before the camera, his collarbone prominent, and his temples peppered with gray and white hair. The label on his photo says: renty, congo, on plantation of b.f. taylor, columbia, s.c.
In 1850, when these images were captured, the subjects in the daguerreotypes were considered property. The bodies in the photographs had been shaped by hard labor on the grub plantation, where they’d spent their lives stooped over sandy soil, working approximately 1,200 acres of cotton and 200 of corn. Brought from the fields to a photography studio in Columbia, South Carolina, each person was photographed from different angles, in the hopes of finding photographic evidence of physical differences between the Black enslaved and the white masters who owned them. A daguerreotype took somewhere between three and 15 minutes of exposure time, and the end result was a detailed image imprinted on a small copper-plated sheet, covered with a thin coat of silver.
Louis Agassiz, a professor at Harvard, commissioned the portraits of Delia and Renty, along with those of other enslaved people, from the photographer Joseph T. Zealy. The daguerreotypes remained, all but forgotten, in the school’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology attic until an archivist found them in a storage drawer in 1976. Since then, these photos of Renty and his daughter Delia have been featured on conference programs, in presentations, and reproduced in books.
As photography has moved from the scientific novelty of Agassiz’s time to ubiquitous contemporary entertainment over the years, the art form has reflected society’s inequity. The rediscovery of the daguerreotypes and their use in revenue-generating materials in the present day have helped surface an ethical issue that has long accompanied images of Black people’s bodies: Their presentation and exploitation still, in many cases, outweigh individual ownership and autonomy.
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