Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894), widely considered to be one of the earliest chemical engineers, revolutionized sugar processing with the invention of the multiple effect evaporator under vacuum. Rillieux’s great scientific achievement was his recognition that at reduced pressure the repeated use of latent heat would result in the production of better quality sugar at lower cost. One of the great early innovations in chemical engineering, Rillieux’s invention is widely recognized as the best method for lowering the temperature of all industrial evaporation and for saving large quantities of fuel.
The birth record on file in New Orleans City Hall is spare: “Norbert Rillieux, quadroon libre, natural son of Vincent Rillieux and Constance Vivant. Born March 17, 1806. Baptized in St. Louis Cathedral by Pere Antoine.”
Vincent Rillieux was an inventor himself who designed a steam-operated press for baling cotton. He appears to have had a long relationship with Constance Vivant, “a free woman of color,” and one of their sons, Norbert, became what is now called a chemical engineer. The use of the father’s surname and the baptism in New Orleans’ cathedral indicate the paternity was publicly acknowledged.
As a boy the precocious Norbert showed an interest in engineering, and his father sent him to France for his education. By the age of 24, Rillieux was an instructor in applied mechanics at the Ecole Centrale in Paris. Around 1830, Rillieux published a series of papers on steam engines and steam power.
While in France, Rillieux began working on the multiple effect evaporator. As George Meade, a sugar expert, wrote in 1946: “The great scientific contribution which Rillieux made was in his recognition of the steam economies which can be effected by repeated use of the latent heat in the steam and vapors.” What Rillieux did, and what became the basis for all modern industrial evaporation, was to harness the energy of vapors rising from the boiling sugar cane syrup and pass those vapors through several chambers, leaving in the end sugar crystals.
Rillieux’s evaporator was a safer, cheaper, and more efficient way of evaporating sugar cane juice than the method then in use, the Jamaica train. In this system, teams of slaves ladled boiling sugar juice from one open kettle to another. The resulting sugar tended to be of low quality since the heat in the kettles could not be regulated, and much sugar was lost in the process of transferring juice from kettle to kettle......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The cold formality of the letter is seared in Debra Long’s memory.
It began “Dear Claimant,” and said her 24-year-old son, Randy, who was fatally shot in April 2006, was not an “innocent” victim. Without further explanation, the New York state agency that assists violent-crime victims and their families refused to help pay for his funeral.
Randy was a father, engaged to be married and studying to become a juvenile probation officer when his life was cut short during a visit to Brooklyn with friends. His mother, angry and bewildered by the letter, wondered: What did authorities see — or fail to see — in Randy?
“It felt racial. It felt like they saw a young African American man who was shot and killed and assumed he must have been doing something wrong,” Long said. “But believe me when I say, not my son.”
Debra Long had bumped up against a well-intentioned corner of the criminal justice system that is often perceived as unfair.
Every state has a program to reimburse victims for lost wages, medical bills, funerals and other expenses, awarding hundreds of millions in aid each year. But an Associated Press examination found that Black victims and their families are disproportionately denied compensation in many states, often for subjective reasons that experts say are rooted in racial biases.
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A white legislator in the North Carolina House interrupted his Black colleague Wednesday to ask if he could have achieved his educational successes at Harvard University had he not been “an athlete or a minority.”
Rep. Jeff McNeely, a Republican from Stony Point and a member of the chamber’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, made his remarks during floor debate Wednesday on a controversial education bill. Legislators were arguing over a bill that would expand the eligibility requirements for North Carolina Opportunity Scholarships. As Rep. Abe Jones, a Democratic lawmaker from Raleigh, debated the bill, McNeely interrupted with a question.
“I understand that you went into public schools and you went to Harvard and Harvard Law,” McNeely said to Jones, who is Black. “And the question I guess, is, would you have been able to maybe achieve this if you were not an athlete or a minority or any of these things, but you were a student trapped in a school that the slowest — you know, in the wild we’ll say the slowest gazelle does not survive, but yet the herd moves at that pace. So the brightest child sometimes is held back in order — “
Before McNeely could finish his comment, House Democratic leader Robert Reives interjected, calling for a point of order. “I’m hoping I wasn’t the only one that got shocked by that comment,” Reives said. “The only reason you went to Harvard is because you were Black and an athlete?” “I did not say that,” McNeely replied. “I said, would that, did that end up being one of the reasons? I do not know that. I asked him this.”
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Many of his colleagues had already left for the night, but as Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, stepped out onto the Capitol steps on Wednesday, he had business left to do: heckling Republicans.
“Have some dignity!” he yelled toward Representative George Santos, the New York freshman who is fighting federal fraud charges, and to a sea of TV cameras waiting below.
“Listen, no more QAnon, no more MAGA, no more debt ceiling nonsense,” he said as he pivoted to another confrontation, this time with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who stood nearby.
The theatrical back-and-forth ended as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow member of the left-wing “Squad,” gave a slight tug to Mr. Bowman’s arm, repeating, “She ain’t worth it, bro” — but not before a handful of lawmakers whipped out cellphone cameras to capture the soon-to-be viral spat.
In this hyperpartisan era, the country has no shortage of politicians willing to savage each other from across a hearing room or on social media. But Mr. Bowman, a media-savvy democratic socialist from the Bronx, has rapidly made a name for himself this spring by going where most of them have not: up to his opponents’ actual faces.
Mr. Bowman’s platform includes far-reaching left-wing policies that split his party. Still, his style — “middle school principal energy,” he calls it — appears to have captured the id of even more moderate Democrats and has fueled party speculation about his ambition.
A video in which an AR-15-owning House Republican from Kentucky tells Mr. Bowman, 47, to “calm down” as they argue over how to stop gun violence has already been viewed more than seven million times. A friendlier confrontation, with a conservative House colleague, spawned a full CNN debate.
Representative Jamaal Bowman
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Atoxic wave of homophobia is surging across east Africa. It is crashing down in Uganda, where members of parliament recently passed a bill that makes being gay a crime punishable by death and not reporting homosexuality a criminal offence. The most common refrain echoed by the anti-gay movement is that homosexuality is “un-African”.
That belief is totally unfounded and ahistorical. As an African mother who has raised a gay child, it breaks my heart to hear such arguments. I know that my son and thousands of other children across Africa are both gay and fully, proudly African.
In our home and in our neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa, Lilitha Mafu was always unique. As early as his third birthday, we knew he had certain qualities that set him apart from his brothers. At his daycare, he would identify as a princess, and he would insist on being dressed in more feminine clothes than his brothers in those early years.
As a mother, I did not want to fight that. I knew I needed to support him to be who he really was, and so that’s how he grew up. Later, he identified as gay. Today he is 21, and when people ask him when he “came out of the closet”, he often says that there was no closet for him to come out of, as his family accepted him from the beginning, and made him realise he had nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
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For some Haitians, it will be a day to rally around their pride by waving their bi-color, horizontal blue-and-red flag through South Florida’s streets while basking in everything from the culture to the cuisine.
But for scores of others, this Haitian Flag Day on Thursday, May 18, will be a day of protests against the debilitating and deadly gang violence sweeping through their homeland amid political turmoil, soaring kidnappings, vigilante killings and questions about U.S. foreign and domestic policies that critics say are contributing to the instability.
In New York, Haitians will be taking to the streets to march, joined by people from Florida, New Jersey and other states with sizable Haitian populations. In Miami, the Family Action Network Movement will sponsor “A day of solidarity with Haiti.” Starting at 10 a.m. the organization will be posting different social media messages demanding a stop to the incessant gang violence, killings and daily human rights abuses in Haiti.
“The people are suffering. Our children are suffering. We are asking the world to stand with us as we fight for security, as we fight for better for our people so that they can finally be able to live in their homeland as any human beings deserve to do,” said Marleine Bastien, the founder of the network and a recently elected Miami-Dade county commissioner. “Enough is enough.”
Bastien said that in addition to using social media platforms to get the word out about the suffering, supporters of the campaign will also be trying to focus attention to their stance on foreign intervention — a proposition that still divides Haitians in the United States and in Haiti, where recent polls show more are in favor of outside help to combat gangs.
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