Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Meredith Charles "Flash" Gourdine (September 26, 1929 – November 20, 1998) was a true American great. Born in Newark, New Jersey - Gourdine was an American athlete (Olympic medalist), engineer and physicist (earning his doctorate). Meredith grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father worked as a painter and a janitor
Gourdine was an outstanding track and field athlete at Cornell University, later becoming a silver medalist in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki (losing by just 1 1/2” to the gold medalist). He was also an esteemed physicist who pioneered the research of electrogasdynamics. He was responsible for the engineering technique termed Incineraid for aiding in the removal of smoke from buildings. His work on gas dispersion developed techniques for dispersing fog from airport runways. He also invented the Focus Flow Heat Sink, used to cool computer chips.
Dr. Gourdine served on the Technical Staff of the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation from 1957-58. He then became a Senior Research Scientist at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1958-60. He became a Lab Director of the Plasmodyne Corporation from 1960-62 and Chief Scientist of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation from 1962 to 1964.
In addition to his athletic, academic, and business accomplishments, Meredith found time for civic activities such as New York Mayor Lindsay's Task Force on Air Pollution, President Lyndon Johnson's Advisory Panel on Energy, and President Richard Nixon's Task Force on Small Business.
Gourdine was inducted to the Dayton, Ohio, Engineering and Science Hall of Fame in 1994, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1991, was a member of the Black Inventors' Hall of Fame, a member of the Army Science Board, and served as a Trustee of Cornell University.
[Obituary from NY Times (Nov 24, 1998)]
Meredith (Flash) Gourdine, the 1952 Olympic silver medalist in the long jump and later an engineer and physicist with 70 patents that deal with thermal management and the conversion of gas to electricity, died Friday at St. Joseph's Hospital in Houston. He was 69.
The cause of death was complications from multiple strokes, said his son, Meredith Jr. He had also been suffering from diabetes and had gradually lost his sight.
Gourdine's success in track and field was more than matched by his scientific achievements later. The companies he founded worked on purifying the air and they produced a commercial air-pollution deterrent, a high-powered industrial paint spray and a device to eliminate fog above airports.
His sports career flourished at Cornell University, where at 6 feet and 175 pounds he competed in the sprints and low hurdles and the long jump. He won four titles in the championships of the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America and five titles in the Heptagonal Games. In 1952, he helped Cornell finish second to Southern California in the National Collegiate Athletic Association championships, in which Southern California had 36 athletes and Cornell 5.
His greatest achievement and greatest frustration in sports came in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. Jerome Biffle, another American, won the gold medal in the long jump at 24 feet 10 inches. Gourdine finished second, an inch and a half behind.
"I would have rather lost by a foot," he said years later. "I still have nightmares about it."
Meredith Charles Gourdine was born Sept. 26, 1929, in Newark. He was raised in Brooklyn, where his father was a painter and a janitor. After classes at Brooklyn Tech High School, he worked eight hours a day on painting jobs with his father.
The son recalled: "My father said, 'If you don't want to be a laborer all your life, stay in school.' It took."......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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"The SAVE Act is not an election security bill — it is a voter suppression bill, full stop," said U.S. Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. The Grio: Trump-backed ‘SAVE Act’ will make it harder for Black voters, critics say
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The “SAVE America Act,” an election overhaul bill that establishes stricter voter registration laws, was passed on Wednesday in the United States House of Representatives, heading to the U.S. Senate and, potentially, to President Donald Trump‘s desk.
The legislation, which would require ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote, has been backed by the White House and described as necessary by President Trump to prevent Democrats from cheating in elections.
“We don’t have voter ID and the Democrats don’t want it. And the reason they don’t want it is because they want to cheat,” Trump said in the Oval Office last week.
But while Republicans say the SAVE Act would restore election integrity–despite there being no evidence of mass voter fraud in any U.S. election–critics of the bill say it will suppress Black and Brown voters and create more barriers to their access to the ballot.
“The Republicans’ amended version of the SAVE Act that passed in the House is nothing more than an effort to undermine the right to vote ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The SAVE Act is not an election security bill — it is a voter suppression bill, full stop,” said U.S. Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. “Republicans have failed our communities with their billionaire-first agenda and policies that have caused the cost of living to skyrocket. They know their only pathway to keeping the majority in Congress is to steal the election by suppressing the vote under the guise of preventing non-existent, widespread voter fraud committed by noncitizens.
Clarke, a Democrat from New York, said the SAVE Act would “undermine” the U.S. election system and make it “harder to vote for millions of eligible U.S. citizens — disproportionately Black and minority voters and women.”
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Haiti is gripped by a nervous countdown. The country is approaching the end of a botched political-transition process. What was supposed to put Haiti on a path back to security after a coalition of gangs seized control of Port-au-Prince, the capital, in 2024, has plunged it further into lawlessness. As The Economist went to press, it was unclear who would run Haiti after February 7th, when the transitional arrangement ends.
The nine-member Presidential Transition Council that has officially been running Haiti over this period was supposed to steer the country to new elections to replace President Jovenel Moïse, who was assassinated in his bedroom in 2021. Instead, the council has bickered over which of them should take over. Some of its members have been accused of extorting bribes. Meanwhile thousands of Haitians have been killed as gangs kidnapped, raped and pillaged almost at will. More than 1.4m people have been displaced. Levels of hunger are about as high as those in civil-war-torn Sudan.
At a time when Donald Trump is attacking the United Nations on many fronts, it is unusual to see his administration working closely with it in Haiti. Together they are aggressively targeting the gangs, while also trying to convince Haiti’s fractious politicians to put aside personal ambition. “We’re about a very basic thing,” says a senior American official. “Security and stability.”
The United States wants the current prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, to stay on after February 7th. He was appointed by the council, but is under pressure from some of its members to leave. Four council members are already under American sanctions for trying to push Mr Fils-Aimé out. They are accused of having “enabled” Haitian gangs “to destabilize the country”. On February 3rd the destroyer USS Stockdale and several Coast Guard cutters arrived in Port-au-Prince bay, perhaps to warn the council to stay in line. In a statement, the American embassy in Haiti said the presence of the warships “reflects the United States’ unwavering commitment to Haiti’s security, stability and brighter future”.
Nonetheless, three members of the council proposed themselves as joint presidents on February 3rd, in defiance of the outsiders. Mr Fils-Aimé’s reliance on foreign powers and his ties to wealthy elites in Haiti’s private sector make him vulnerable to nationalist accusations of carrying water for the “blan”, the word Haitians use to describe foreigners. The defecting council members purport to represent those more nationalist factions.
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The University of Texas at Austin will fold its African and African Diaspora Studies department into a newly created academic unit this fall, part of a broader consolidation that faculty say follows increasing political scrutiny of programs focused on race and identity.
Beginning in September, the College of Liberal Arts plans to launch a Department for Social and Cultural Analysis Studies, combining African and African Diaspora Studies with Mexican American and Latino Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and American Studies.
Interim Dean David Sosa shared the update with department leaders on Thursday, noting that curriculum and degree programs are now under review. While no immediate layoffs were announced, faculty say the long-term impact—including funding, faculty governance, and institutional support—remains uncertain.
Having departmental status carries weight at major universities, often shaping budget access, hiring decisions, and tenure influence. Professors worry the restructuring could ultimately weaken programs that have helped broaden scholarship and reflect the experiences of historically underrepresented communities.
“There can be no reason for this decision other than an authoritarian takeover of Texas’ flagship university,” associate professor Lauren Gutterman said, questioning why other smaller humanities departments were not included if fragmentation were the primary concern.
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As the sports world celebrates Ilia Malinin for landing a backflip at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina and pushing the limits of figure skating with boundary-breaking athleticism, it’s worth noting something the headlines keep leaving out: Surya Bonaly, a Black woman, did it first. She did it decades ago. And she did it more dangerously, more defiantly, and under rules, scrutiny, and politics far harsher than anything today’s skaters face.
As coverage swells around today’s generation of male technical power skaters and their flirtation with once-taboo acrobatics, it raises a bigger question about memory, race, and authorship in elite sports. Because this isn’t just a conversation about a backflip. It’s about who gets remembered as innovation’s architect, who gets pushed out of origin stories, and how in a political climate already hostile to Black history, media storytelling quietly reshapes who the public believes pushed sport forward in the first place.
Right now, coverage of Ilia Malinin, the 21-year-old American skater nicknamed the “Quad God,” reads like the arrival of a new era. Broadcasts and sports outlets describe his skating as electric, revolutionary, boundary-shattering. They say he has the kind of technical dominance that signals the future of the sport. NBC coverage called one Olympic performance “near-perfect,” describing crowds ready to explode before he even finished skating. Commentators talk about him as if he represents the next evolutionary step in men’s figure skating.
And to be clear, Malinin is extraordinarily talented. This is not about tearing down one athlete. This is about examining which stories get amplified and which ones get buried. Because that breathless language lands very differently if you know the sport’s history, and if you remember who was penalized, dismissed, or treated like a novelty for pushing those same physical boundaries first.
Long before this era of technical hype cycles, Surya Bonaly, a Black French adoptee, was doing backflips in the late 1980s and 1990s, when figure skating was aggressively policing what counted as “proper” skating. The backflip had already been banned in international competition since the 1970s, officially under the language of safety. But like many rules in aesthetic sports, it was also about control over what skating should look like, who should perform it, and how visible athletic risk was allowed to be.
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