Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Dr. Alexa Canady-Davis was the first Woman and first African American to become a Neurosurgeon in America. From Lansing Michigan, Alexa Irene Canady is the daughter of Elizabeth Hortense (Golden) Canady and Clinton Canady Jr. Her father was a graduate of the School of Dentistry of Meharry Medical College, practicing in Lansing. Her mother was a graduate of Fiasco University was active for years in civic affairs of Lansing. She also served as national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
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Young Canady and her brother grew up outside Lansing and were the only two Black students in the entire school. Despite the obstacles, Canady was an exceptional student and named a National Achievement Scholar in 1967. She attended the University of Michigan, getting her BS, degree in 1971. After this came the University of Michigan, Medical School, and her M.D. cum laude in 1975. Canady’s Interned at Yale’s New Haven Hospital from 1975 to 1976, and an example of her non-recognition due to being Black and a woman came on her first day of her residency at Yale New Hane Hospital. She was appointed as first female and first black to a residency in neurosurgery. As she began making her rounds a hospital administrator referred to her as "the new equal-opportunity package." Despite the remark, Dr. Canady viewed her accomplishment as a double achievement for herself and both women and African Americans.
From there she went to the University of Minnesota in neurosurgery, from 1976 to 1981. She also worked at the University of Pennsylvania Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Ped Neurosurg from 1981-82. Currently, Canady is the director of neurosurgery at Children's Hospital in Detroit and a clinical associate professor at Wayne State University. Her Areas of Expertise are Craniofacial Abnormalities, Epilepsy, Hydrocephalus, Pediatric Neurosurgery, and Tumors of Spinal Cord and Brain. She has also added to special research topics such as assisting in the development of neuroendoscopic equipment, evaluating programmable pressure change valves in hydrocephalus, head injury, hydrocephalus and shunts, neuroendoscopy, and pregnancy complications of shunts......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Looking back at several decades of social change in America's pass time TNR: Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game by Rob Ruck
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I BECAME A serious baseball fan in the mid-1950s, when my mother took me to the Polo Grounds to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play the New York Giants. The loudest cheers at that hulking old stadium in central Harlem were for a quartet of black men—Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella who played for Brooklyn, and Willie Mays who starred for the Giants. Most of the fans my mother and I sat among were also African-Americans. Many seemed delighted that a little white boy was rooting just as loudly for the rival Dodgers as they were.
The location of the park was just one reason for the racial complexion of the crowd. Before Jackie Robinson integrated the majors in 1947, the Negro Leagues—one of the largest black-owned businesses in America—had drawn well, and amateur baseball was played all over black America. Integration soon destroyed the market for blacks-only pro baseball. Ironically, fewer black men made a living playing baseball in the 1950s than had during the heyday of Jim Crow. But that did not dissuade African-American fans from streaming into major-league games, eager to see how athletes of their race would fare against white and light-skinned Latin competitors. “Nothing was killing Negro baseball but Democracy,” wrote the black journalist Wendell Smith.
During the following two decades, the number and prominence of African-American players steadily increased. By the late 1970s, they made up 27 percent of all major leaguers—roughly equal to the percentage of Latinos on rosters today. Such black stars as Don Baylor, Reggie Jackson, Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey, Sr., Willie Stargell, and Dave Parker ranked among the most dominant hitters, while Ricky Henderson and Davey Lopes (and Maury Wills in the 1960s) made stealing bases a critical part of the game for the first time since the dead ball era ended in the 1920s.
Today the thrill which African-Americans once received from—and gave back to—the game at every level is all but gone. They make up less than 9 percent of Major League baseball players, and they are even scarcer in ballpark seats and in the lineups of youth and adult amateur leagues. Last fall hardly anyone seemed to notice that the World Series champions, the San Francisco Giants, had not a single American-born black man on their roster. Meanwhile, Latino players—nearly all of whom are immigrants or the sons of immigrants from Caribbean lands—are among the leading figures in the sport. It is as hard to imagine an All-Star game today without Alex Rodriguez or Albert Pujols, as it once was without Robinson, Mays, Reggie Jackson, or Barry Bonds. Why did this ethnic turnover happen?
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The former president of the defunct community-organizing group is back with a new venture. She talks about the video scandal, lambastes Democrats with "no spine and no courage" and explains how the conservative right actually helped her move forward. The Root: Bertha Lewis on Life After ACORN
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One year after the community-organizing group ACORN disbanded -- after an undercover video scandal and a denial of federal funds by Congress -- the organization's former president is back. Today Bertha Lewis is at the helm of the Black Institute, her newly created "action tank" dedicated to immigration reform, environmental justice, education and economic fairness.
While Lewis is optimistic about her latest endeavor, she still can't escape the controversy surrounding ACORN. Once the nation's largest grassroots network for the poor, it provided employment services and advocated for affordable housing. But the organization acquired notoriety during the 2008 campaign when it registered more than 1 million low-income voters but submitted thousands of registration cards with phony names and addresses.
Although ACORN workers had themselves flagged and reported the suspicious cards, the organization was peppered with accusations of voter-registration fraud, and became a target for Republicans convinced that it was a criminal enterprise.
ACORN shut its doors last year, following broad condemnation over videos posted on Andrew Breitbart's website. The undercover videos, made by conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, showed the pair dressed as a pimp and prostitute and appearing to get help from ACORN workers for child trafficking and other illegal activities.
Several investigations, including probes by the California attorney general and Brooklyn, N.Y., district attorney, proved that the tapes were heavily edited to be completely misleading, and found that ACORN employees had not facilitated prostitution or otherwise violated the law. The exonerations, however, didn't come until after the U.S. Congress had already stripped the group's funding. (Later still, Congress' own investigation further cleared ACORN of any wrongdoing.)
For her part, Lewis is looking ahead. She talked to The Root about how her former colleagues are doing their old work under new names, her current efforts to get more African Americans behind immigration reform and why she's annoyed by many progressives -- and surprisingly grateful to the conservative right.
Karen Bleier/AFP
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My family’s history represents the painful stain of injustice in the U.S. says Karume James in explaining why he has joined the movement. ColorLines: Drop the I-Word: I Am…an Ally, Activist and Friend
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Karume James is a community organizer based in South Los Angeles, California. He helps to develop community leadership and organize people across generations and ethnic backgrounds through his work as communities rising director at the Community Coalition. He says, “Racism is everybody’s problem, and until we work together to eliminate racial oppression in the U.S., poor people and people of color, regardless of status, will continue to be subjected to the constant burden of racism in all its forms,” James says. “A way to work towards this is challenging discriminatory language that is used to define people.” We are proud to count on Karume James as an ally and friend.
For the “I Am…” storytelling project, people from all walks of life relate experiences, demand respect and reject criminalizing language about immigrants. Stories are gathered in collaboration with allies and campaign partners.
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Nearly 60 years after the landmark case, we’ve yet to resolve the fundamental question of how to deliver high quality public education to kids of all races. Color Lines: Still Separate and Unequal, Generations After Brown v. Board
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{May 17th] is the 57th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that declared racial segregation in U.S. public schools unconstitutional. Also today, American schools are more segregated than they were four decades ago.
If eradicating racial segregation in education was the original civil rights battle, it continues to be the most enduring one. A court decision that called “separate but equal” schools unlawful led to a couple hopeful decades of racial integration. But today most U.S. kids go to schools that are both racially and socioeconomically homogenous.
Around 40 percent of black and Latino students in the U.S. are in schools than are over 90 percent black and Latino, according to a 2009 study by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. The schools that black and Latino kids are concentrated in are very often high-poverty schools, too. The average black student goes to a school where 59 percent of their classmates live in poverty, while the average Latino student goes to a school that’s 57 percent poor.
And it’s not just blacks and Latinos who are racially isolated. White students go to schools that are 77 percent white, and 32 percent poor.
The Obama administration, which is leading an aggressive school reform agenda, knows what’s going on. In a major speech calling for the overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged in understated terms the re-segregation of U.S. schools, as well as the fatigue with everything that’s been attempted to address it.
“Most minorities were still isolated in their own classrooms,” Duncan said of students growing up in the civil rights era, adding, “Many still are today, and we must work together to change that.”
“We’ve had five decades of reforms, countless studies, watershed reports like ‘A Nation at Risk,’ and repeated affirmations and commitments from the body politic to finally make education a national priority,” Duncan said. “And yet we are still waiting for the day when every child in America has a high quality education that prepares him or her for the future.”
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A love child, an alleged sexual assault, unpaid bills at Tiffany. Wait. It's not the black underclass misbehaving -- it's the white elite. The Root: The Hot Un-Ghetto Mess!
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In California, ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger destroys his family by revealing that he had a love child with the housekeeper. In New York City, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is arrested for an alleged sexual assault on a hotel maid. In Washington, D.C., Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich runs up a six-figure bill at Tiffany & Co. buying bling for his third wife, who also happens to be his former mistress.
Sounds like the lineup for an episode of The Jerry Springer Show! Has the time finally come for social scientists who blame the so-called culture of poverty for the lowly status of the black underclass to start focusing on the equally pathological culture of the wealthy, powerful -- and, not coincidently, virtually all-white elite? Will conservative white politicians like Gingrich finally stop lecturing the black poor about their "bad habits" and start cleaning up their own acts?
If only it were so.
I'm not arguing that the self-destructive conduct of many of the black poor isn't one of the major causes of their problems. Only a fool would assert such a ridiculous idea.
But as these incidents torn from this week's headlines make clear, while the sort of self-destructive, irresponsible and slothful attitudes and behaviors that we impute to the poor souls stuck at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder are also common at its pinnacle, we treat those at the top very differently.
For one thing, society does not tend to judge all rich white people by the standard of, say, Bernie Madoff or Paris Hilton. Their failings are seen as flaws resulting from their individual characters, not as manifestations of the inherent characteristics of members of their entire class. The black poor, on the other hand, are routinely subjected to blanket condemnation when some member of their group behaves deplorably.
More important, with a nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous observation, influential whites are different than you and me: When they exhibit the exact-same sort of immoral, anti-social conduct that we find so abhorrent among the black poor, they don't have to pay the same price.
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