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 was the first African American woman to reach both the North and South Poles. When Barbara Hillary passed away last November I remember seeing remembrances of her life on cable TV and on NPR. Years earlier when she has accomplished many of the later feats which she ii best know for I had seen her in interviews, but I had forgotten about them.
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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More than three decades before the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play in protest of an issue rooted in race, John Thompson refused to coach in protest of an issue rooted in race.
It was January 1989.
The NCAA had just voted to implement a rule that would deny athletic scholarships to freshmen who fail to qualify for athletic eligibility under the academic standards of Proposition 48, and estimates showed roughly 90% of the 600 students that would be negatively impacted annually were black. For obvious reasons, this infuriated Thompson, the legendary Georgetown men's basketball coach who was a giant figure in the African-American community, both inside and outside of sports. So right after his players were introduced, and just minutes before tipoff against Boston College, Thompson tossed his famous white towel to an assistant, walked across the court and eventually exited the Capital Centre in a large sedan.
He drove around for a while, he later said.
He listened to the game on radio.
Then he turned it off.
John Thompson
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Charles McMillon Jr. was dropping off a U-Haul van with his young son and childhood friend Kendrick Clemons when out of nowhere bullets started flying.
They had just parked the van at a U-Haul drop-off at Fountain Plaza on Apalachee Parkway and were sitting in McMillon’s truck getting ready to go. As he typed in the mileage on a phone app, a gunshot rang out.
They looked back and saw an older couple coming toward them, both pointing guns in their direction. The couple yelled “Don’t move!” and other commands to surrender.
But McMillon threw his GMC truck in reverse, drove around the van and sped off in a blind panic. They heard more gunfire as they fled.
They managed to escape Thursday night with their lives — incredibly, a police officer who happened to be in the parking lot intervened after the shooting began. But they’ll never forget their ordeal — the product, they said, of racial profiling by would-be vigilantes.
Charles McMillon Jr. and Kendrick Clemons
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We are truly living on a bizarro world. White Cop Accuses Raptors Exec Masai Ujiri Outed of 'Racial Animus', 'Anti-Law Enforcement Prejudices' The Atlantic: Sheriff's deputy accuses Masai Ujiri of falsely alleging 'racial animus' in counterclaim .
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The Alameda County (Calif.) sheriff’s deputy suing Toronto Raptors president of basketball operations Masai Ujiri for assault after Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals in Oakland accused the executive of exploiting current “pervasive anti-law enforcement prejudices” to paint himself as a victim when in fact he had broken the NBA’s own security rules, in a new court filing today.
“The body camera video which plaintiff produced on July 17, 2020 did not reveal any new information to Defendants,” Strickland wrote, arguing it only provided a new angle of what arena footage already showed. “In reality, Defendants brought this motion to take advantage of the now pervasive anti-law enforcement prejudices and to falsely allege racial animus and prejudicial bias is the reason for Plaintiff Alan Strickland’s conduct on the date of the incident.”
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The ACLU of Georgia released the report which was conducted by the Palast Investigative Fund, a nonpartisan group that focuses on data journalism, on Wednesday.
For the report, Palast hired expert firms to conduct an Advanced Address List Hygiene, a method of residential address verification, to review 313,243 names that were removed from the state's voter rolls in late 2019. Their findings claim that 63.3% of voters had not, in fact, moved and were purged in error.
Reacting to the report, Andrea Young, executive director of the ACLU of Georgia, told CNN, "on the one hand, I was deeply saddened and on the other side, not entirely surprised."
Young described the method the state has used to maintain its voting list as "prone to tremendous error" and not on par with the industry standard for residential address verification.
CNN previously reported the Georgia Secretary of State said the removal of the voters is not a "purge" but part of routine maintenance on voting lists that dates back to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
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Though widely shared now (one Twitter clip has been viewed 3.6 million times), what happened next still has the power to quicken the pulse. For almost five minutes, Boyega – sounding every inch the literal son of a preacher – rallies the crowd with a visceral, personal and profane account of what it’s like to be black in the same societies that gave us the barbaric deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Stephen Lawrence and the countless others like them. “I need you guys to understand how painful this shit is,” he tells the mass of raised fists and camera phones, his voice cracking. “I need you to understand how painful it is to be reminded every day that your race means nothing! That isn’t the case any more. That is never the case any more.” Voices whoop and spur him on. “We are a physical representation of our support for George Floyd. We are a physical representation of our support for Sandra Bland... for Stephen Lawrence, for Mark Duggan!”
He is angry, of course, screaming himself as hoarse as a pro-wrestling heel and letting emotion spring from him like a burst pipe. But he is almost transgressively vulnerable too, open and tearful and scared in a way that black men – and incredibly famous black men, at that – are rarely seen publicly.
For Steve McQueen, the Oscar-winning director who cast Boyega in Small Axe, this was the most striking aspect of his speech. “I think of myself as a warrior, because I’m all about battles, but all of a sudden [it was like] he had just taken off his armour and said, ‘Here it is,’” he tells me, over the phone. “It was kind of frightening in a way. You’re thinking, ‘Get your sword up.’ But there’s strength in vulnerability and being naked. He shone very brightly and I rang him a few days after to say thank you.”
Boyega himself stresses there was nothing planned or calculated about the speech, its sentiment and delivery was something he had been building towards. “I feel like, especially as celebrities, we have to talk through this filter of professionalism and emotional intelligence,” he says. “Sometimes you just need to be mad. You need to lay down what it is that’s on your mind. Sometimes you don’t have enough time to play the game.” The rawness, he says, came from looking out into the crowd that day and seeing his own fear and weariness mirrored in the eyes of the other black men present. “That just made me cry,” he adds. “Because you don’t get to see that.”
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Several years ago, researchers in Kenya decided to study the effects of a universal basic income (UBI) trial on people’s wellbeing. Some 6,000 recipients in a 12-year trial beginning around 2017 received 75 cents a day — not much, but enough, their research found, for people to be less food-insecure and more likely to start a business. Others received payments for just two years (that ended in December 2019), and still others received a lump sum payment.
In early 2020, the coronavirus hit. In response, governments like Kenya’s imposed harsh lockdowns that sought to prevent the virus’s spread but that also had devastating impacts on the economy.
That prompted researchers to ask: How does receiving a UBI (or having received a UBI up until recently) affect how communities are hit by a serious economic setback like this one? The researchers decided to check back in on the households in their UBI trial. This week, Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, GiveDirectly’s Michael Faye, the late Princeton economist Alan Krueger, UCSD’s Paul Niehaus, and MIT Sloan’s Tavneet Suri released a working paper — meaning it has not yet undergone peer review — on what they found.
Mostly, they found encouraging news: Even a very small UBI can really help with a deeply difficult situation. The lockdown in Kenya to reduce the spread of the coronavirus was hard on rural communities like those in the UBI study, which were already quite poor. The social safety net is limited, and people go hungry even in good times. When people earned less money, they were more likely to have to give up necessities. Food insecurity was widespread — 68 percent of households in the control group reported experiencing hunger in the last 30 days.
Caroline Teti of Give Directly Kenya in front of a household selected for the universal basic income study.
Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images
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Major oil companies are lobbying the United States to pressure Kenya to change its world-leading stance against plastic waste, according to environmentalists who fear the continent will be used as a dumping ground.
The request from the American Chemistry Council to the Office of the United States Trade Representative came as the US and Kenya negotiate what would be the first US bilateral trade deal with a country in sub-Saharan Africa.
That deal is expected to be a model for others in Africa, and its importance helped lead to the Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta’s White House visit with Donald Trump this year – a rarity for an African leader during this administration.
In 2017 Kenya imposed the world’s strictest ban on the use, manufacturing and import of plastic bags, part of growing efforts around the world to limit a major source of plastic waste. Environmentalists fear Kenya is now under pressure not only to weaken its resolve but to become a key transit point for plastic waste to other African countries.
A man walks on a mountain of plastic bottles, carrying a sack of them to be sold for recycling, at the dump in the Dandora slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP
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