Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Herman Russell Branson (August 14, 1914 – June 7, 1995) was an African American physicist, best known for his research on the alpha helix protein structure. He was also the president of two colleges.
Branson received his B.S. from Virginia State College in 1936, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cincinnati, under the direction of Boris Padowski, in 1939. After a stint at Dillard University, he joined Howard University in 1941 as an assistant professor of physics and chemistry. He remained at Howard for 27 years, achieving increasingly important positions, eventually becoming head of the physics department, director of a program in experimental science and mathematics, and working on the Office of Naval Research and Atomic Energy Commission Projects in Physics at Howard University.
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In 1948, Branson took a leave and spent time at the California Institute of Technology, in the laboratory of the chemist Linus Pauling. There he was assigned work on the structure of proteins, specifically to use his mathematical abilities to determine possible helical structures that would fit both the available x-ray crystallography data and a set of chemical restrictions outlined by Pauling. After some months of work, Branson handed in a report narrowing the possible structures to two helixes, a tighter coil Pauling termed "alpha," and a looser helix called "gamma." Branson then returned to Howard to work on other projects.
Branson went on to a significant career, eventually serving as president of Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, from 1968–1970, and then president of Lincoln University until his retirement in 1985. He was active in increasing federal funding for higher education, and helped found the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education in 1969.
In 1984 Branson wrote Pauling biographers Victor and Mildred Goertzel implying that his contribution to the alpha helix had been greater than the final paper indicated. “I took my work to Pauling who told me that he thought they [the proposed alpha and gamma helixes] were too tight, that he thought that a protein molecule should have a much larger radius so that water molecules could fit down inside and cause the protein to swell,” he wrote. “I went back and worked unsuccessfully to find such a structure.” When he received Pauling’s note with the draft manuscript, Branson wrote, “I interpreted this letter as establishing that the alpha and gamma in my paper were correct and that the subsequent work done was cleaning up or verifying. The differences were nil.
Branson was co-inventor of the alpha helix and perhaps deserved a share of the Nobel prize. As the story goes somehow Linus Pauling got Branson excluded from the prize [new Yorker mag]....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A lost classic of African literature—chaotic, dreamlike, and funny—finally gets its due. Slate: “I Only Want a Little Authenticity!”
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When I was in college, after a discussion of Chinua Achebe at the tail end of a survey course in English literature, I got into an argument with a classmate who suggested that plenty of African literature was good but could never be great because it was so political. Leaving aside the obviously problematic use of “African” as a catch-all classification for literature from 1 billion people in 52 countries (and a decidedly Eurocentric bias), my classmate’s musings did identify a tension at the very root of the Western world’s interaction with so-called African literature. Can literature be both overtly political and also great?
It seems an absurd question when considering many prominent works of the English canon. What is Coriolanus if not a commentary on the life cycles of autocrats? What is Great Expectations if not an extended criticism of class distinction in 19th-century Britain? And yet, with writings by African authors the question persists: Is it high art delivering timeless and universal commentary on the human condition, or is it little more than a guide to the culture and politics of a specific continent (with occasional literary flourishes)? The question will not die because of the Western tendency to view life in Africa as so profoundly alien that nearly everything written from the continent becomes not literature, but a manual—and we all know how we feel about manuals.
The first wave of interest in African writers hit the global literary scene around the same time many countries won independence from oppressive colonial regimes. Beginning in the 1960s, writing from the continent was parsed so thoroughly for political meanings that a sentence was always more than a simple sentence: It was commentary on race, culture, or the politics of colonialism and independence. The stunning craft and beauty of writing by Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, for example, was often overlooked; criticism of their work focused in large part on how new Africa presented itself to its former masters—rather than how great writers from a portion of the world presented their many and varied takes on the existential questions that torment us all. African writing was labeled political because Western interest in Africa was, primarily, political.
A generation later, a second wave of interest in African writing arose as the world became reacquainted with Africa as a realm of human suffering—a continent that needed to be saved from itself by the same people who had so thoroughly exploited and rubbished it. Again it seems much of the writing by African authors of the aughts (including my own) was seen as illuminating a very particular form of African misfortune (war, disease, corruption) and not issues that were globally generalizable. In other words, to reinterpret my long-ago classmate’s comment, African literature will never be great in the Western mind not because it is political, but because it is African—and African is too particularly other to be universal.
The Ghanian poet and educator Kojo Laing released his debut novel Search Sweet Country, newly reprinted by McSweeney’s, in 1986—directly between those two eras of international visibility for African writing, a time when once-prestigious universities across the continent fell into disrepair, victims of despots and broken economies. Born in Kumasi, a city well inland from Ghana’s coastal capital Accra, Laing was educated in the U.K., earning a master’s in political science and history at Glasgow before returning to a Ghana completely transformed from a hopeful place post-independence to an economic and political basket case ruled by increasingly aggressive and paranoid military regimes. Gone were the pseudodemocratic Pan-African rhetorical escapades of Kwame Nkrumah, replaced by the numbing military speak (“Operation Keep Right,” “Operation Feed Yourself”) of the generals who overthrew the civilian regime and then each other through the 1970s. It’s those strongmen, particularly Ignatius Acheampong and his successor Fred Akuffo, who most concern Search Sweet Country, a book that for years has confounded those who try to summarize and categorize it.
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The judge in the George Zimmerman case issued a written order Thursday setting his bond at $1 million. TheGrio: Zimmerman’s new bond amount: $1 million.
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Zimmerman is charged with second degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin, 17.
Zimmerman’s bond was revoked June 1st after prosecutors revealed he and his wife misled the court about their finances ahead of his April 19 bond hearing. At that time, bond had been set at $150,000. It was later revealed that Zimmerman had raised more than $150,000 in donations through a website he created.
Judge Kenneth Lester heard arguments last Friday from Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’Mara, and from prosecutors, as to whether the original bond should be reinstated, new bond set, or, as the state wanted, no new bond granted at all. O’Mara argued at the second bond hearing that the state’s case was weak, and therefore the original bond should apply. Prosecutor Bernie De La Rionda countered that the state has significant evidence of Zimmerman’s guilt on second degree murder charges, and that the severity of the crime warrants a “no bond status.”
George Zimmerman after his arrest (Gary Green/Pool)
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The battle against voter suppression goes on. Colorlines: A Case Study in How Kris Kobach’s Cabal Aims to Remake Election Law.
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“Some 1,500 people voted under dead people’s and prisoners’ names from 2008-11, according to Michigan’s auditor general. Many might be clerical errors, but this illustrates the need to ensure accurate voter rolls.”
Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson wrote this in a July 2 Times-Herald column, and she lied.
Johnson is a member of a 15-state consortium of rightwing elections officials that’s hell-bent on purging voters. And her dishonest jousting in Michigan this week offers a window into how that consortium works—playing fast and loose with facts in order to create the impression of a problem that would justify their hardline solutions, and flouting the law themselves when necessary.
Johnson’s Monday column was a last-ditch effort to persuade Gov. Rick Snyder to sign into law her Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) initiative, including the bills HB 5061 and SB 803, which respectively would force voters to reaffirm their citizenship before receiving a ballot and would require photo ID for absentee voting. Another bill, SB 754, would put onerous restrictions on third-party registration organizations, much like a Florida law that was recently blocked by a federal judge. On Tuesday, Gov. Snyder vetoed those three bills, but preserved the rest of Johnson’s SAFE package.
Despite Johnson’s constant refrain on dead people voting, her own Bureau of Elections has already established there was no actual voter fraud in the auditor general’s report she referenced in her July 2 column.
While it’s true that the auditor general initially found close to 1,500 cases in which a dead or imprisoned person appeared to vote, the Department of State’s Bureau of Elections (BOE) said the auditor general was mistaken on all 1,500 counts (pdf; page 17). The auditor general reports that BOE informed investigators “that in every instance where it appears a deceased person or incarcerated person voted and local records were available, a clerical error was established as the reason for the situation. In addition, the Department [BOE] informed [the auditor general] that in some cases, voters submitted absent voter ballots shortly before they died. The Department informed us that the examples provided did not result in a single verified case that an ineligible person voted.”
A voter casts his ballot in the February 2012 Michigan primaries. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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The priceless, 8,000-piece collection of rare African-American memorabilia Nathaniel Montague spent decades collecting could be dismantled if a buyer doesn't come forward by mid-July. CNN: Time running out for African-American collection.
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During a status hearing in bankruptcy court scheduled for July 20 in Las Vegas, creditor ABKCO Music & Records plans to ask the court to conduct an auction of the items in the Montague Collection, which includes slave and indentured servitude documents, a signed copy of Phillis Wheatley's "Poems on Various Subjects" dated 1773, and a handwritten letter from Booker T. Washington seeking financial assistance for 221 students at Tuskegee.
"There's nothing I can do," Montague said. "I wish there were, but there isn't. I just hope that we don't turn out to be losers, and that I get something for my efforts."
Montague, a onetime radio personality who coined the phrase "Burn, Baby, Burn," spent 50 years acquiring rare and one-of-a-kind pieces of American history, including books, photographs, paintings and ephemera. An assessment of five of the pieces puts their total value somewhere between $592,000 and $940,000. His goal was to turn it into a museum. Now that it is out of his possession, he just wants to see his life's work remain intact.
Years ago Montague and his wife of 56 years, Rose Casalan, began taking out loans to archive and prepare the collection for sale. They found themselves overextended financially and declared bankruptcy last year. The collection was seized and is now housed under tight security in Las Vegas. It is in the hands of a trusteeship charged with selling it to satisfy the debts, including a judgment for $325,000 plus fees from New York-based ABKCO, an independent entertainment company that owns rights to recordings by Sam Cooke, The Rolling Stones and Bobby Womack.
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In 1938, the African-American painter Hale Woodruff was commissioned to execute murals for a new library at Alabama's Talladega College, one of this country's first all-black colleges (founded in 1867). WSJ: From Mutiny to Harmony.
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Woodruff produced six monumental canvases about wide-ranging aspects of black history, all packed with agile, generously scaled figures rendered with sinuous drawing and luminous color. The first three paintings, completed in 1939, deal with the Amistad mutiny and its aftermath as emblems of heroic African protest against slavery and New Englanders' support of the rebellious slaves' cause; the second trio, completed in 1942, celebrates the opening of Talladega College and the construction of the library itself as paradigms of black Americans' progress since the Civil War.
The Talladega murals, which initially attracted wide attention, may be Woodruff's most accomplished works, yet despite their visual strength and narrative power, they have been little known during the nearly seven decades since their installation in the lobby of the college library. Now, for the first time, the murals will reach a far wider audience. After a year of conservation that fully revealed their rich, varied palette, the six paintings are the center of an informative survey, "Rising Up: Hale Woodruff's Murals at Talladega College," organized by Stephanie Heydt of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in collaboration with the college. "Rising Up" will be at the High through Sept. 2, 2012, after which it will travel to the 80WSE Gallery at New York University, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American Culture and History in Washington, and four other museums.
Woodruff was 38 when he received the Talladega commission. (Born in 1900 in Ohio, and raised in Tennessee, he died in 1980 in New York, where he taught at New York University for more than 20 years.) After studying at the John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, Woodruff broadened his experience at the Art Institute of Chicago's school, Harvard's Fogg Museum School, and in Paris between 1927 and 1931. "Rising Up" first introduces us to the gifted young painter in Paris, experimenting with a variety of modernist painting languages. The early works suggest an awareness of Paul Cézanne, Maurice Utrillo, Chaim Soutine and Cubist fractured space, none of these radical at the time but all different from what Woodruff had already mastered.
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