Commentary: African American Scientists, Explorers and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Barbara Hillary (June 12, 1931 – November 23, 2019) was an American nurse, publisher, adventurer, and inspirational speaker. Hillary life is a testament to being courageous and resilient at all phases of a person’s life; no matter their age. Hillary was the first African American woman to reach both the North and South Poles. When Barbara Hillary passed away I remembered seeing remembrances of her life on cable TV and on NPR. Years earlier when she has accomplished many of the later feats for which she is best know for I had seen her in interviews.
Born in New York City and raised in Harlem, Hillary attended the New School University, from which she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in gerontology. She used her gerontology degrees to establish a career in nursing. Her focus was on training staff members in the concepts of patient aging and service delivery systems in nursing homes. Hillary was also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Peninsula Magazine, a non-profit multi-racial magazine based in Queens, New York. Peninsula magazine was ground breaking and the first of its kind in the New York city area. Hillary also founded the Arverne Action Association, a group dedicated to improving life in Arverne, New York and the Rockaway New York Community.
Still working at the age of 67, Hillary survived a bout with lung cancer. The resulting surgery caused her to lose 25 percent of her lungs’ capacity. Unfortunately this was actually her second fight with cancer. She had previously survived breast cancer in her mid-twenties .
After this second bout with cancer she subsequently retired from nursing. But unlike most retirees and older cancer survivors she actually became more active in the second chapter of her life. Hillary became interested in Arctic travel and fell in love with the beauty of the North, after photographing polar bears in Manitoba, Canada. At some point Hillary discovered that no black woman had reached the North Pole, so she decided to become the first one.
Top of the World- New Yorker Magazine - May 28, 2007 Issue
Barbara Hillary, a seventy-five-year-old resident of Queens, was on her way to becoming the first African-American woman on record to reach the North Pole. She had been taking her vitamins, hoarding fleece, and enduring grueling treadmill runs at Rockaway Park’s Cyberzone gym. The one part of the journey that was not proceeding smoothly, as she explained then, was the matter of how to pay for it: she had raised thirteen thousand dollars, but she needed almost twice that amount to make the trip. Hillary seemed convinced that she would overcome this financial hurdle—“I believe mental poverty is a self-inflicted condition,” she said, as if to reify the expedition into existence. And many of this magazine’s readers—including an eleven-year-old boy from Louisiana, who wrote, “You have had a great life,” and a man who sent a two-dollar bill, for luck—shared Hillary’s determination. Fortified by their good wishes and their contributions, Hillary arrived in Longyearbyen, Norway, on April 16th.
Hillary had raised over $25,000 to fund her expedition to the Arctic. Upon her arrival, she also had to pass a fitness exam. After a battery of tests, she was deemed fit to participate in the expedition.
On April 23, 2007, at the age of 76, Hillary became not only one of the oldest persons to set foot on the North Pole, but also the first African American woman to do so. Barbara Hillary dedicated her travel to the North Pole to her mother, Viola Jones Hillary, who moved from the “Low country” of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina to New York City in the 1930s to give Barbara and her sister, a chance for a better life. Barbara Hillary’s father had died when she was only one year old.
“Part of you is saying, ‘I can’t believe I made it this far’; another part is saying, ‘Let this thing be over with’; another part, ‘Damn, it’s cold’; and another part, ‘The time is here. Can you rise to the occasion?’ All of that is compounded by the fact that the sun is shining at three-thirty in the morning. Talk about a head trip.” Swaddled in layers of long underwear, a red-and-black snowsuit, and a blue hooded shell, Hillary looked like a sumo wrestler on skis as she slogged across the desolate tundra. Pressure ridges—“incredibly beautiful ice sculpture made by nature”—yielded intermittent wonder, but, otherwise, the journey was as illimitable as the terrain. “It just seemed like I would never get there,” Hillary said. “I asked my guide, ‘When am I going to reach the North Pole?’ and he didn’t say anything—he just kept going and going.” After several hours, the guide stopped and turned to Hillary. “He said, ‘Barbara, you’re standing on top of the world,’ ” she recalled. “That’s when I went crazy!”
In a moment of elation (and temporary climate amnesia), Hillary ripped off her gloves and thrust her fists into the air. “I have never experienced such sheer joy and excitement,” she said. “I was screaming, jumping up and down, for the first few minutes,” she said. For her trouble, she got a frostbitten thumb and a terrific photograph.
Top of the World- New Yorker Magazine - May 28, 2007 Issue
Five years later, after her history making journey to the North Pole, on January 6, 2011, at age 79 Hillary wowed the world again by becoming the first African American woman to reach the South Pole.
After her expeditions to the North and South Poles, Hillary became an inspirational speaker. She was the subject of profiles on several major news outlets and gave speeches to various organizations, including the National Organization for Women. (NOW). In 2019, she traveled to outer Mongolia to investigate the impact of climate change.
After being admitted to a hospital in Far Rockaway, New York she passed away on November 23, 2019 in New York. She was 88 years old.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A New Jersey father has entered a plea deal after fatally punching a man who called his kids the N-word. Lavallette-Seaside Shorebeat reports that the Black man, Anthony Collins, struck Robert May, 70, in September 2023 in Seaside Heights, NJ. Collins pled guilty to manslaughter in connection to the attack in June and will now spend three years in jail. Under terms of the No Early Release Act, the man will need to serve about 31 months of his sentence before he’s eligible for parole.
Defense attorney Terrence Turnback detailed the events that led up to the attack, which began with May hurling slurs at Collins and his children repeatedly for months. Collins and his wife encountered the older man around that time, with May running into the woman and “assaulting” her with his bike. The man then called Collins the N-word, which prompted Collins to punch him in the face, knocking him out unconscious.
“[He was] dealing with an individual he was well aware of from the standpoint that he had called his children ‘ni**er kid’ over eleven to twelve occasions,” Turnback said about his client, Collins. “Their alleged victim was looking for my client, assaulted his wife, and called him a name that’s reprehensible.”
Atlanta Black Star reports that law enforcement arrived on the scene to find the elderly man lying on the ground with blood spewing from his mouth. While he was treated at the scene, May refused any further assistance and was released. However, he began acting “erratic” in the aftermath of the attack, and the Tri-Boro First Aid Squad transported him to the Community Medical Center. Robert May would eventually succumb to his injuries, dying on Oct. 1, 2023.
“A post-mortem examination conducted on that date by the Ocean County Medical Examiner’s Office determined the cause of Mr. May’s death to be blunt force injury resulting from the assault which occurred in Seaside Heights on September 18, 2023, and the manner of his death to be homicide,” a press release from Ocean County police read. “A continuing investigation by the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office Major Crime Unit and Seaside Heights Police Department determined that Collins was, in fact, the individual who assaulted Mr. May on September 18, ultimately resulting in his death.”
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Black church leaders are determined to take back the narrative from white Christian nationalists, contending they have wrongfully used faith to justify policies that attack Black, brown, and LGBTQ communities and women. These leaders also see Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as the consummate political figure to help them push back against the Christian right’s agenda.
“She is the perfect warrior at this moment,” said Bishop Joseph Tolton, a pro-LGBTQ, Pan-African faith activist who recently convened Black faith leaders, including Dr. Rev. William Barber II and Bishop Yvette Flunder, to publicly condemn the pro-Donald Trump and Republican playbook known as Project 2025.
“The fact that she is African-American, but also a person of color, more broadly, and the fact that she is a woman, she [can] ignite a fire on the left,” Tolton told theGrio.
Democrats and liberal activists have united in their outrage against Project 2025 and its connections to Trump and his presidential campaign, even as the Republican nominee has attempted to distance himself from the 922-page document experts warn will roll back freedoms for Black Americans and other minorities.
Black Christian leaders say they have a responsibility to enter the political arena and call out Trump and Republicans who use faith to justify policies like restricting abortion care and censoring LGBTQ identity in public spaces while also simultaneously attacking racial equity programs and suppressing voting rights.
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In response to new and resurging mpox outbreaks in multiple African countries, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention declared mpox a continent-wide public health emergency Tuesday. Although many countries outside of Africa rapidly contained an mpox pandemic that began in 2022, large outbreaks continued unabated in west and central Africa. And now, a deadlier strain is spreading across borders in Africa.
Mpox, previously known as monkeypox, is an infectious disease closely related to but much less severe than smallpox, and is suspected to originate in African rodents and non-human primates. Mpox spreads through close contact with an infected person, including from sexual and skin-to-skin-contact. Pregnant people can also pass the virus to their child during pregnancy and after birth. The most common symptom of mpox is a blister-like rash that typically lasts for two to four weeks. Other symptoms include fever, fatigue, muscle aches, cough, and sore throat.
For decades, mpox caused sporadic cases and outbreaks in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and several other African countries. There are two main strains of mpox: clade I, which causes more severe illness and has historically been confined to central Africa, and clade II, which has historically caused infections in west Africa.
In May 2022, countries outside of Africa suddenly started recording mpox cases which were caused by the clade II type. That July, the World Health Organization declared the pandemic a public health emergency of international concern. By May 2023, more than 100 countries had recorded nearly 90,000 mpox cases and over 150 deaths.
Fortunately, public health agencies around the world acted quickly to improve disease surveillance efforts, increasing awareness among high-risk populations, particularly men who have sex with men, and encouraging safe sex practices. In the US and Europe, where there were just over 30,000 and 25,000 mpox cases respectively between May 2022 and May 2023, officials also disseminated over a million vaccine doses. Consequently, mpox transmission in most countries quickly dwindled. In May 2023, the World Health Organization lifted the emergency status.
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Activists have raised the alarm over police violence in the Brazilian state of Bahia, as new figures revealed that more children and adolescents are killed by the region’s security forces than anywhere else in the country.
Two hundred and eighty nine people aged 19 and under were killed by police in Bahia last year, up from 242 in 2022, according to a new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety.
Last year, one in every three child victims of homicide in Bahia was killed by the police, the figures show.
Bahia is Brazil’s fourth-most populous state and the epicentre of the country’s Black culture. For the past 17 years it has been ruled by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers’ party (PT).
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I’m going to cut to the chase — “Daughters,” a documentary now streaming on Netflix, broke me down. I was in tears, nearly inconsolable for a time and honestly, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to finish watching the film. I did, but I didn’t feel better when it was over. I was thankful that I am able to hug, touch, speak to and be present for my daughter pretty much all of the time.
“Daughters,” directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, focuses on a group of incarcerated fathers and their relationships with their daughters as they prepare for a “Date with Dad” dance at the Washington, D.C., jail where the fathers are housed. The fathers go through a 10-week fatherhood course on what it means to be a present father, which is both a logistical and psychological nightmare in the leadup to this dance. At the same time, the daughters are also preparing for this day. It follows four girls in particular who are of varying ages and varying relationships with their fathers. The relationship part is where I knew the documentary was going to turn me into an emotional trainwreck.
For instance, the youngest girl, Aubrey, is 5 when we meet her, and she clearly loves her father, Keith. She is aware of how long he’ll be gone, optimistic about his return and has a vivid memory of her relationship with him. She’s a bubbly, smart little girl. All I could think and wonder was whether or not that relationship was sustainable; little kids are innately focused on the positive, but bigger kids start to settle on reality, and the day-to-day absence starts to wear. We, unfortunately, see that play out over the years as they follow the kids in the film. Where we start with Aubrey and Keith is not where we end, and it broke my heart for their relationship because, by the time Keith is set to get out of prison, Aubrey will be about 15. You cannot get those formative years back.
There’s Ja’Ana, who doesn’t even remember what her father, Frank, looks like and barely has any relationship with him. There’s Santana, who is upset with her father, Mark, for continuously going in and out of jail, and then there’s 15-year-old Raziah whose father, Alonzo, is doing a 30-year-bid, and she is quite clear on the negative effects of his incarceration on her.
Watching the girls’ stories (their mothers were also included) and seeing how hard their father’s incarceration has been on them was tough. I have a 15-year-old daughter that I can’t imagine being removed from. As a parent and father, certain content about being a parent always draws on emotions I might not even realize are there. I cry at all types of stuff now, from movies to commercials to intentionally manipulative videos and reels on social media. Being a parent changes you; my kids are often a source of motivation and frankly, keep me going when times feel tough. I cannot imagine not seeing them or touching them. The empathy I felt for the daughters and their fathers tugged at me for the entirety of the doc.
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