Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
One of the things that really urkes me is that we will never truly know all the inventions by blacks who couldn't protect there work because patents were not given out, and in some cases the inventions were stolen by whites that the black people worked for. This has so many ramifications since innovation leads to entrepreneurship and wealth building. However some freed blacks were able to punch some holes in the system.
One such man is Thomas Jennings
Thomas Jennings stands in history as a noteworthy figure for being the first Black person to ever receive a patent, but his life should serve as an example of what was, and what could have been, for Black people in the earliest years of the United States.
Thomas Jennings was born in 1791 and worked in a number of jobs before focusing on what would become his chosen career... as a tailor. Jennings' skills were so admired that people near and far came to him to alter or custom-tailor items of clothing for them. Eventually, Jennings reputation grew such that he was able to open his own store on Church street which grew into one of the largest clothing stores in New York City.
Jennings, of course, found that many of his customers were dismayed when their clothing became soiled, and because of the material used, were unable to use conventional means to clean them. Conventional methods would often ruin the fabric, leaving the person to either continue wearing the items in their soiled condition or to simply discard them. While this would have provided a boon to his business through increased sales, Jennings also hated to see the items, which he worked so hard to create, thrown away. He thus set out experimenting with different solutions and cleaning agents, testing them on various fabrics until he found the right combination to effectively treat and clean them. He called his method "dry-scouring" and it is the process that we now refer to as dry-cleaning.
In 1820, Jennings applied for a patent for his dry-scouring process. In light of the times, he was fortunate that he was a free man....Read More >>
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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On Monday, a district court judge ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has a “mandatory duty” to respond to the civil rights complaints it accepts within a 180-day deadline. The ruling is the result of a 2015 lawsuit brought by five environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping, in response to the EPA’s failure to address complaints in a timely manner.
Apparently, ineffective enforcement isn’t all that new at the EPA.
“The EPA’s Office of Civil Rights is notorious for being ineffective,” said Adam Babich, an environmental law professor at Tulane University, to Earther.
He’s right. In one instance cited in the lawsuit, the EPA took more than 20 years to begin investigating a complaint against a wood incinerator in Flint, Michigan. That investigation only happened after the St. Francis Prayer Center took part in the recent lawsuit.
“The Court finds that the EPA’s failure to issue preliminary findings or recommendations and any recommendations for voluntary compliance constitutes agency action unlawfully withheld,” read the rulingby Senior District Court Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong.
Current regulations require the EPA take 20 days to decide whether it’ll investigate a civil rights complaint. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity in 2015 found the agency takes closer to 250 days to decide. Most cases are rejected. As for those that get accepted, the agency should take no more than 180 days to respond, but that’s rarely the case. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights corroborated the Center’s investigation in a 2016 report, stating that the “EPA has a history of being unable to meet its regulatory deadlines and experiences extreme delays in responding to Title VI complaints in the area of environmental justice.”
Those delays can last more than a decade, as this lawsuit shows. Plaintiffs filed their original complaints, all in regards to race and class discrimination, between 1994 and 2003. The issues at hand range from the location of gas-fired power plants in California, to Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality alleged discrimination when deciding who can testify during permitting processes, to the decision to permit a New Mexico waste facility near a Latino community. After accepting these complaints, the EPA ignored them until plaintiffs took them to court.
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In the photo that made him famous, Devonte Hart is crying. More accurately, he is weeping, tears streaming down his face as he embraces Portland, Oregon, police officer Bret Barnum during a protest in that city. Taken over three months after Michael Brown was killed by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and the day after a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson in November of 2014, “the hug shared around the world” quickly went viral.* As CNN described it at the time, it was “the picture we needed to see after the past week’s turmoil”—the turmoil being the boiling frustration and anger at yet another reminder that black lives did not, in fact, matter. The photo of Hart and Barnum was both contrary to and in direct conversation with the violence and anguish of photos that had emerged from Ferguson in the weeks preceding it. Now, almost four years later, with Hart missing and widely presumed dead, he is once again a flashpoint for a larger debate on the ways in which institutional racism operates in America.
Devonte Hart’s adoptive parents and three of his siblings were found dead almost a week ago when their SUV plunged 100 feet off of a California highway. Hart, and two of his sisters, have not yet been found, but police “have every indication to believe that all six children were in there.” At first, investigators insisted that there was no reason to assume that the crash was intentional, despite the fact that there were no skid or brake marks at the turnout on the Pacific Coast Highway where the car went over. More recently, the incident has taken on a sinister tone, as a history of familial abuse has begun to come to light. According to KOMO News, child protective services had attempted to contact the Harts at least three times in the weeks leading up to the crash, after their neighbors reported the children’s adoptive white mothers, Jennifer and Sarah Hart, for potential child abuse. In the past year not only had one of Devonte’s sisters, Hannah, arrived at the neighbors’ front door with her front two teeth missing and a request for the DeKalbs to save her but, according to the Press Democrat, Devonte had taken to begging the neighbors for food.
Sarah Hart had already pleaded guilty to domestic assault in 2011, when a teacher discovered bruises across their then-6-year-old daughter’s stomach and back. For admitting to letting “her anger get out of control,” Hart was given a 90-day suspended jail sentence and a year of probation. The family was then allowed to move from Minnesota to Oregon with their six children, all black, and given no oversight. Before eventually relocating to rural Washington state, they started home-schooling their children without filing the proper notices to state agencies. According to a former neighbor, the six kids rarely went outside, even in nice weather. At least three of them had been identified as “potential victims of alleged abuse or neglect” by CPS. And now, the entire family is dead in a tragedy that officials are saying “may have been” intentional.
Even in the unlikely case that it wasn’t, the Hart’s story is a tragic case study in racial disparity. The ways in which Sarah and Jennifer managed to continually evade the notice (or action) of officials is a luxury that is by and large only provided to white parents. All three of the states that the family lived in received reports of child welfare concerns, and yet apparently the children were never removed from the Harts’ care. The disparity in ramifications for suspected—and confirmed—child abuse is particularly striking when compared with the jail time black mothers receive for something like leaving their kids at a food court while they were doing an interview less than 30 feet away. Or for testing positive for marijuana after giving birth. Or for only being able to afford an apartment where your landlord won’t fix a rat problem.
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The 1960s were known for their turmoil, but the degree to which guns were a factor is sometimes overlooked. Not only was a president assassinated, but an ex-Marine opened fire from an observation deck in Austin and the homicide rate leaped by more than 50 percent, driven by fatal shootings. Gun sales soared, prompted by fears of violence and rioting.
But the mayhem and violence didn’t seem to move a Congress that refused to take gun-control legislation seriously. It would not even approve a proposal to outlaw the mail-order purchase of rifles, like the one Lee Harvey Oswald bought for $19.95, plus shipping and handling, and used to kill President Kennedy.
One of the few major gun control measures enacted, in California, was a reaction not to violence but to the Black Panthers’ exercising their right to bear arms by patrolling with loaded rifles.
The political calculus began to change on April 4, 1968. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis. Nine weeks later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Los Angeles.
Finally, gun control became a possibility — at least in the hands of President Lyndon B. Johnson, a master at turning tragedy into legislative gain. He had used the death of President John F. Kennedy to pass the Civil Rights Act, and wrung the Voting Rights Act from the Bloody Sunday march from Selma to Montgomery. Now he would try for the Gun Control Act.
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A few months after I moved to South Africa in 2009, I expressed the wish to meet Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife, to a friend of mine. This friend was a political activist who’d been present at many epochal moments of the struggle against apartheid in the 1980s and the remaking of the nation in the 1990s. Eager to get me acquainted with the country’s history, he normally answered nearly every message I wrote to him within the hour. Except for my request about Winnie. Several notes and text messages about Winnie got no reply, until finally he called me back. In a pained voice, he asked, “Aren’t you sure you wouldn’t rather meet Graca”—Nelson Mandela’s third, less controversial wife?
When Winnie died this week, one South African friend of mine wrote of her “tremendous love and admiration” for Madikizela-Mandela on Facebook. “Thank you Winnie Mandela for what you sacrificed for all of us,” the country’s leading educator, a university professor, wrote. South Africa’s most famous radio host declared her “the gold standard of rage as moral uprightness.” “Rest as you lived, fiercely in power,” a fourth friend, an academic, said. The plaudits were as loving overseas. The Women’s March released a statement, and Jennifer Hudson and Forest Whitaker tweeted praise.
The outpouring of emotion at Madikizela-Mandela’s death startled me, because it ran in contrast to the mix of emotions expressed towards her while she was alive. Unfortunately, I never got to meet the “Mother of the Nation,” as she was honorifically called. But reading the local papers over the years, I got the impression she was a person—maybe the person—the country didn’t like to think about too much, or too deeply. Another friend, who offered to bring me to see Winnie in the township of Soweto just a couple weeks ago—she was generous with guests, especially the poor—whispered to me that, when I met her, I would hear “truths” that South Africa liked, as a country, to avoid. Another black South African writer I know lamented to me that, while she was alive, some people who liked to think of themselves as “savvy” treated her as “a bit of a joke, or someone to subtly ignore.” She didn’t represent South Africa abroad. When I visited the house she once shared with Nelson Mandela in Soweto, an official with the African National Congress (ANC)—the movement she and Mandela co-created—told me that it was “too bad” Winnie still had some authority over the house, because the detritus of her real life interfered with the house’s “coherence” as a historical monument. He complained that the house didn’t “look right” because it wasn’t appropriately “preserved.”
Indeed, Winnie interfered with the whole South African story. She came to represent what might have happened if a different turn had been made at a fork in the path. Never imprisoned on Robben Island but exiled from Johannesburg and put under house arrest by the white-run police in the 1980s, she broke with the ANC’s dedication to nonviolence and encouraged a harder stand, including pursuing supposed collaborators with the white regime; this stance led to the gruesome 1989 murder of a 14-year-old black boy in her charge, Stompie Sepei. She never agreed to completely forgive white or wealthy South Africans like her husband did; she also held to account leaders of color she believed had chummed up too much with elites and their institutions. A few years ago, she told a British writer that Mandela had sold out and negotiated a “bad deal” for black people. She dared to call Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the few leaders everybody in the world can celebrate for his unbending faith in the power of “joy,” a “cretin.” At her 1997 Truth and Reconciliation hearing, discussing her alleged involvement in the killing of Sepei, writers noted with awe—and some fear—that her face remained impassive, as if she refused to admit there was anything tragic or unjust about the possibility of such an event, even as she declined to say how much she had been involved.
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The announcement of a new prime minister has led to widespread celebrations, but reforming the country without alienating the army will not be easy. Foreign Policy: Can Abiy Ahmed Save Ethiopia?
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In 1990, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was a guerrilla alliance battling the Derg, a Marxist-Leninist military junta that had deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in a 1974 coup. A year later, the EPRDF took power; it has ruled Ethiopia ever since.
When the Derg fell, Abiy Ahmed, who was recently elected as the EPRDF’s chairman and sworn in as prime minister on Monday, was just 14 years old. But even then, Abiy, who was born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother in the Oromo town of Beshasha in southwestern Ethiopia, was becoming politically active.
“In one way, the world is eagerly awaiting our country’s transition, and in another way, they are waiting in fear,” Abiy said in his maiden speech as prime minister. “We have a country in which our fathers have sacrificed their bones and spilled their blood,” and yet the nation has kept its unity. “This is the season in which we learn from our mistakes and compensate our country,” he continued. “I ask forgiveness from those activists and politicians who paid the sacrifice and youths who wanted change but lost their lives.” He even spoke of applying Ethiopia’s constitution in a way that understands “freedom,” especially freedom of expression and the rights to assembly and association — suggesting that he may lift the state of emergency that has led to the detention of more than 1,100 people.
In the capital of Addis Ababa, people in cafes clapped and cheered in front of television screens.
At a town on Ethiopia’s porous southern border with Kenya, where Ethiopia’s military last month announced it had mistakenly killed Oromo civilians, locals celebrated by slaughtering camels, cows, and goats. People in Jimma, the largest city in southwestern Ethiopia, were singing; a student at Jimma University told me, “We have got one of our own!”
More than a third of Ethiopians belong to the Oromo community and about a fifth to the Amhara, while Tigrayans represent 6 percent, according to the latest census. Together, the Oromo and Amhara make up more than half of Ethiopia’s population of 105 million. These demographic realities and the distribution of power among these groups are the defining feature of Ethiopian politics.
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On February 1, 1968, two Memphis sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death when the trash compression mechanism in their truck malfunctioned. Their deaths served as further evidence of the dangerous working conditions sanitation workers in the city had been dealing with for more than a decade.
Soon after, some 1,300 Memphis sanitation workers walked off the job in protest of a volatile mix of dangerous working conditions, poor benefits, inadequate pay, and an inability to form a union recognized by the city.
The strike began on February 12, 1968, and lasted until April, drawing national attention and the support of a number of civil rights figures, including Martin Luther King Jr. He saw the Memphis strike and the workers’ demand for union rights as embodying the goals and values of his fledgling Poor People’s Campaign, a movement that sought to bring a multiracial coalition of religious leaders, workers, and the poor together to fight poverty in a way that intentionally centered the voices of the marginalized.
It was the strike that would bring King to Memphis several times that spring, including on April 4, the fateful day of his assassination at the Lorraine Motel. Shortly after King’s assassination, the striking workers gained union recognition and some benefits, overcoming Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb’s longstanding resistance to reaching an agreement.
Fifty years later, a new generation of activists, religious leaders, and civil rights groups aim to carry forward the legacy of the 1968 sanitation strike. Their efforts began in February, as fast-food workers affiliated with the Fight for $15 movement, which organizes around raising the minimum wage, gathered in Memphis and dozens of other cities, joining a new iteration of the Poor People’s Campaign to fight for racial and economic justice, union rights, and a moral revival aimed at lifting up the needs of the working poor.
The actions will culminate in a six-week period of civil disobedience and protest in a number of states this year, eventually fulfilling King’s original goal of bringing the needs of poor people directly to the nation’s capital.
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Good jobs in black communities have disappeared, evictions are the norm, and extreme poverty is rising. Cities should be exploding—but they aren’t. The Atlantic: Where Have All the Rioters Gone?
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n august 5, 1966, someone struck Martin Luther King Jr. in the head with a rock. The assault happened not in Birmingham or in Memphis but in Chicago. Earlier that year, King had moved into a run-down apartment on the city’s West Side to bring national attention to the plight of blacks trapped in slum housing and confined to overcrowded schools. That day, he was marching in a white neighborhood for the right of families like his to live wherever they chose. The rock dropped King to one knee. He stayed like that for a moment, trying to get past the pain. “Aides and bodyguards closed in around King,” one account reads, “holding placards aloft to shield him from the missiles that followed.” The white onlookers broke into a riot, bloodying dozens of marchers.
While recovering from his injury, King said he needed to appear in public “to bring this hate into the open.” In a country that had never been shy about its hatred of black people, this was an odd remark. But King’s audience was amnesiac white northerners who had shielded themselves from the racial clash. During the Great Migration, black families fleeing Ku Klux Klan terrorism and dirt poverty in the rural South moved to urban ghettos in the North. As the folk saying went, “The South doesn’t care how close a Negro gets, just so he doesn’t get too high; the North doesn’t care how high he gets, just so he doesn’t get too close.” When he did get too close, hard and heavy objects rained from the sky. In 1919, a black teenager in Chicago named Eugene Williams drifted to the white side of the Lake Michigan swimming area. White bathers pelted him with rocks. The youngster drowned, and 38 others (23 black, 15 white) died in the week of rioting that ensued.
Historically, whites have been the ones to cast the first stones, inciting and then dominating most American race riots. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921: Whites destroyed a prosperous black community, using machine guns and even dropping bombs from planes. Detroit, 1943: Skirmishes between white and black youths escalated into a full-blown riot that left 34 people dead, most of them black. Milwaukee, 1967: Thousands of whites beat back a crowd protesting housing segregation, hurling rocks and bottles of urine.
But the riotous images that loop in our collective memory are those of Watts and Detroit and Baltimore in the 1960s. The unrest reached an epitome in April 1968, when black anguish over King’s murder saw city after city set on fire. King himself was only 39 years old when he died, but many black youths spoke a different language. Theirs wasn’t the cadenced, masculine oratory of the southern pulpit but the quick, clean shatter of brick through glass. This was speech that possessed, in the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick’s estimation, “the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come.” That power was unleashed in more than 100 cities, where blacks looted and burned white-owned establishments.
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