Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Lonnie Johnson was born on October 6, 1949 in Mobile, Alabama. His father worked as a civilian driver at Brookley Air Force Base, and his mother was a homemaker who worked part time as a nurse's aide. His father taught Robert and his brothers how to repair various household items, prompting the boys to create their own toys. The boys once made a go-kart out of household items and a lawn mower motor. Although his parents were excited about his interest in science and inventing, they weren't prepared for the time he decided to experiment with a rocket fuel he created with sugar and saltpeter which exploded and burned up part of the kitchen. His talents were more refined when he attended Williamson High School and in 1968, as a senior, took part in a national science competition sponsored by the University of Alabama. There he displayed a remote controlled robot named "Linex" which he built from scraps found at a junkyard and parts of his brothers' walkie-talkie and his sisters' reel-to-reel tape recorder. He placed first in the competition and entered Tuskeegee University on a mathematics scholarship.
(con't.)
At Tuskeegee he was elected into the Pi Tau Sigma National Engineering Honor Society and graduated with distinction in 1973 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering. He continued on at Tuskeegee and received a Master's Degree in Nuclear Engineering in 1975.
After graduation, he took a position at the Savannah River National Laboratory, conducting thermal analysis on plutonium fuel spheres. He later served as a research engineer, developing cooling systems at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lonnie Johnson. He then joined the Air Force and was assigned to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he served as the Acting Chief of the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section. In 1973, he left the Air Force and took over as Senior Systems Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He worked on the Galileo Mission to Jupiter, but returned in 1982 to his military career. He worked at the Strategic Air Command (SAC) facility in Bellevue, Nebraska and then moved to the SAC Test and Evaluation Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base in Edwards, California where he worked on the Stealth Bomber. He also worked as Acting Chief at the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section of the Air Force Weapon Laboratory at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico. A Captain, he was awarded the Air Force Achievement Medal and the Air Force Commendation Medal. In 1987, Johnson returned to his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he worked on the Mars Observer project, and served as the fault protection engineer on the Saturn Cassini mission project. He later worked as a project engineer for the Kraft mission which studied asteroids.
Earlier, around 1982, he was working on developing a heat pump that would work by circulating water rather than expensive and environmentally unfriendly freon. In his basement at home, he took some tubing with a specially devised nozzle on the other end and connected it to a bathroom sink. When he turned on the faucet, a stream of water shot out of the nozzle across the room with such force that the air currents caused the curtain to move. His first thought was "this would make a great water gun.".....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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We don't need to talk about race. We need to end racial profiling. The New Republic: No More "Conversations".
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I have a hard time joining the chorus celebrating the President's comments on Trayvon Martin as one of his most stirring speeches. His legendary race speech in 2008 was near literary; Friday's statement qualified more as remarks. Personal, yes but this is a President who has written a best-selling autobiography and regularly prefaces his statements on all manner of issues with comments about Michelle and I and his daughters. Yet yesterday's talk may have been his most significant statement on race, for reasons of symbol as much as of substance.
Namely, in making a statement, Obama has made truly significant a movement implacably embittered by George Zimmerman's acquittal. That movement has the potential to be historically crucial, because the fact that things like what happened to Trayvon Martin are more likely for a black boy than a white one is what keeps conversations on race from being productive. An America where there was not a high-profile case every two years or so of an innocent young black man killed by a white (or in the case of Zimmerman, perhaps white-ish) person under menacingly ambiguous circumstances would be one where the race thing would no longer be so occult, so loaded, and so resistant to true healing.
Non-black observers are not uncommonly wondering why black America is making such a big deal over the murder, however tragic, of one person one night in one place. Why, they wonder, do black people have to magnify one episode into a statement about how America feels about the lives of black boys?
But this misses that for black people, as Obama got across in his speech, the poisonous relationship between young black men and law enforcement is the prime manifestation of racism in modern America.
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Let's stop the violence. NewsOne: Reps. Davis Rush to Hold Summit On Chicago Urban Violence.
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âIf you really want to solve these problems, then letâs sit down and have a comprehensive and meaningful discussion and letâs begin with summer jobs. If youâre going to ask for $30 million to give to the FBI or the Chicago Police Department to sweep down and pick up 18,000 young Black men off the streets â then where is the money to employ some of these same Black men who [want] to be employed?â
Rush also said in the statement that the community and officials need to focus on job training programs, arguing that youth gang violence is not just âa law and order issue or a lock them up issue.
The jails are teeming now with African Americans, Latinos, but mostly African Americans, and that still has not addressed the problem of gangs, drugs and violence, Rush said in the release.
Violence is so severe in Chicago that some concerned citizens and lawmakers have called for the National Guard to stand sentinel in gang-infested neighborhoods, and Rev. Al Sharpton is planning to spend some time in the city with the chapter of his National Action Network to figure out ways to address the problem, Rachel Noerdlinger, his spokeswoman, told NewsOne.
Part of the problem, Rush points out is the dismantling of public housing projects. The so-called forced migration of an estimated 20,000 families in recent years has resulted in unexpected frictions as people move from one community to another.
Davis also cites unemployment, poverty and access to decent housing and education as major factors in the growing unrest, which will be major topics of discussion during the event, he said.
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Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would ask a court to require Texas to get permission from the federal government before making voting changes in that state for the next decade. New York Times: Holder Wants Texas to Clear Voting Changes With the U.S.
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In a speech before the National Urban League in Philadelphia, Mr. Holder also indicated that the court motion expected to be filed later on Thursday is most likely just an opening salvo in a new Obama administration strategy to try to reimpose preclearance requirements in parts of the country that have a history of discriminating against minority voters.
His statements come as states across the South, from Texas to North Carolina, have been rushing to enforce or enact new restrictions on voting eligibility after the Supreme Court's ruling in the Shelby County v. Holder case, which removed that safeguard.
This is the department's first action to protect voting rights following the Shelby County decision, but it will not be our last, Mr. Holder said. Even as Congress considers updates to the Voting Rights Act in light of the court's ruling, we plan, in the meantime, to fully utilize the law's remaining sections to subject states to preclearance as necessary. My colleagues and I are determined to use every tool at our disposal to stand against such discrimination wherever it is found.
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The only thing I really find amazing is that some people actually believe conservatives really want to broaden their coalition beyond rich guys and confederates. The Atlantic: It's the Racism, Stupid.
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National Review's Victor Davis Hanson takes on the president's comments with predictable results. Here Hansen counters The Talk that African-American parents give their children about the police with his own version of The Talk:
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Holder noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him. The sermon was about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males. Apparently, Holder believes that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Yet I fear that for every lecture of the sort that Holder is forced to give his son, millions of non-African-Americans are offering their own versions of ensuring safety to their progeny.
In my case, the sermon -- aside from constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race -- was very precise.
First, let me say that my father was a lifelong Democrat. He had helped to establish a local junior college aimed at providing vocational education for at-risk minorities, and as a hands-on administrator he found himself on some occasions in a physical altercation with a disaffected student. In middle age, he and my mother once were parking their car on a visit to San Francisco when they were suddenly surrounded by several African-American teens. When confronted with their demands, he offered to give the thieves all his cash if they would leave him and my mother alone. Thankfully they took his cash and left.
I think that experience -- and others -- is why he once advised me, "When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you." Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like "typical black person." He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young -- or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.
(THIS CONTINUES LIKE THIS, dopper0189)
I really, really hope not. By Hanson's own admission this "Talk" has done very little to protect him, and he implies that it didn't help his father either. That is not surprising given that this is the kind of advice which betrays a greater interest in maintaining one's worldview than in maintaining one's safety.
Let us be direct -- in any other context we would automatically recognize this "talk" as stupid advice. If I were to tell you that I only employ Asian-Americans to do my taxes because "Asian-Americans do better on the Math SAT," you would not simply question my sensitivity, but my mental faculties. That is because you would understand that in making an individual decision, employing an ancestral class of millions is not very intelligent. Moreover, were I to tell you I wanted my son to marry a Jewish woman because "Jews are really successful," you would understand that statement for the stupidity which it is.
It would not be acceptable for me to make such suggestions (to say nothing of policy) in an enlightened society -- not simply because they are "impolite" but because they betray a rote, incurious and addled intellect. There is no difference between my argument above and the notion that black boys should be avoided because they are overrepresented in the violent crime stats. But one of the effects of racism is its tendency to justify stupidity.
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All I can say is that Colbert nailed this one.
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I always thought Madame CJ Walker was the first who knew.... New York Times: Gotham’s Only Black Millionaire.
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Writing to Frederick Douglass in 1852, the black intellectual James McCune Smith noted Jeremiah G. Hamilton as the only black millionaire in New York, disparaging him for the crassness of his pursuit of wealth. But despite Hamilton's prominence in his own lifetime, modern American historians have ignored him.
What makes Hamilton's invisibility all the more remarkable, is that, paradoxically, he was larger than life, anything but a reticent figure lost in the background. Indeed, he left a pretty hefty footprint on the historical record: there are tens of thousands of words of newsprint about him and, in the archives, well over 50 court cases involving Jeremiah Hamilton as either plaintiff or defendant. His well-documented experience as a wealthy black man provides a unique but illuminating perspective on the possibilities and limits of black life in the nation's largest city, before and during the Civil War.
Hamilton was a broker, a black man whose very existence flies in the face of our understanding of the way things usually were in New York in the middle of the 19th century. Far from being some novice feeling his way around the economy's periphery, he was a Wall Street adept, a skilled and innovative financial manipulator. Unlike later black success stories who would make their fortunes selling goods to black consumers, Hamilton cut a swath through the lily-white New York business world of the mid-1830s, a domain where his depredations soon earned him the nickname of The Prince of Darkness. Others, with even less affection, simply called him Nigger Hamilton.
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