Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Lloyd Albert Quarterman was born in Philadelphia on May 31, 1918. As a young boy he soon discovered his passion for science and spent many hours working with chemistry sets. When he was older during the 1930’s, Quarterman went to college at St. Augustines in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was here that Quarterman not only developed a reputation for science, but also for his abilities on the football field. He earned his bachelors degree in 1943.
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Immediately following graduation Quarterman was hired by the United States War Department. He was one of only six African Americans to be involved with research for the atomic bomb. His official title was an assistant to an associate research scientist and chemist. It is not known what his exact duties were because those who worked on the Manhattan Project were sworn to secrecy. Many different teams were involved with the building and completion of the atomic bomb. Quarterman worked on the teams at Columbia University in New York City and at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
It was on this team at the University of Chicago that the atom was first split, creating nuclear fission. Quarterman occasionally worked along side Albert Einstein to help create uranium isotopes. These were necessary for uranium gas, which made fission possible. This project was very secretive and also became known as the plutonium project. It was under this project that the first nuclear reactor, pile, was built. This is the most essential part of modern nuclear power plants. In 1945 when W.W.II ended, Quarterman was recognized with a certificate from the US War Department for helping to bring the war to an end.
This Chicago team became known as Argonne National Laboratories. This lab, funded by the University of Chicago, but no longer secretly, searched for peaceful uses for nuclear energy. Quarterman remained involved with this team for the next 30 years. During this time he also studied quantum mechanics. This helped to strengthen his ability as a scientist. In 1952, because of his dedication and hard work, he earned a Masters of Science from Northwestern University......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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I have high hopes for this movie. The Grio: '42' shows why Jackie Robinson still matters.
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There’s a scene in “42″ in which Jackie Robinson, the first black player in modern Major League Baseball, endures intolerably cruel racial slurs from the Philadelphia Phillies’ manager.
It’s early in the 1947 season. Each time the Brooklyn Dodgers’ first baseman comes up to bat, manager Ben Chapman emerges from the dugout, stands on the field and taunts him with increasingly personal and vitriolic attacks. It’s a visible struggle, but No. 42 maintains his composure before a crowd of thousands.
As a viewer, it’s uncomfortable to watch — although as writer-director Brian Helgeland points out, “if anything, the language we have in that scene was cleaned up from what it was.”
Such hatred may seem archaic, an ugly episode in our nation’s history that we’d rather forget. But remembering Robinson’s accomplishments is more important than ever, say people involved with “42″ and baseball historians alike. And because he was such an inspiring cultural figure, it’s more important than ever to get his story right.
Helgeland, an Oscar winner for his “L.A. Confidential” screenplay who previously directed “Payback” and “A Knight’s Tale,” said he felt “an enormous amount of pressure” to be faithful to Robinson’s story, both because of his significance and because his life had been written about so extensively. That included recreating games right from the box scores. So when Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) homers during a crucial pennant-race game off a pitcher who’d dinged him earlier in the year, it’s a dramatic moment, but it also actually happened.
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One of those "little things" that is actually a "big thing" that shouldn't get lost in his obituary. Slate: Roger Ebert Was a Great Champion of Black Film.
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sensibility and prior experiences to, say, a film, no matter how thoughtful you are. This has always made discussion of movies by black filmmakers tricky. If a movie by Spike Lee, for instance, fails to find a footing among mainstream critics, how much does it matter that most of those critics are white? Probably depends on the movie, right? And it also depends on the critic.
Roger Ebert never shied away from discussing race, nor was he afraid to recognize his own privilege. And never was this more evident than during the uproar surrounding Do the Right Thing, which divided critics at the time—some thought it a timely tour de force speaking truth about heightened racial tensions, while others considered it an irresponsible endorsement of violence against whites. Ebert wasn’t the only white critic who championed the film, of course; Vincent Canby of the Times gave it a glowing review, to cite just one other example. But Ebert was almost alone among white critics in approaching the touchy subject matter of the movie without any reservations, and with a sensitivity others did not (or could not) employ.
When answering those (mostly white) critics who wondered how Lee could possibly depict a predominantly minority urban space without any trace of guns or drugs, Ebert righly pointed out how Lee departed from Hollywood’s fetishizing of urban culture. “People live here,” he wrote of the film’s Brooklyn neighborhood.
It's a neighborhood like those city neighborhoods in the urban movies of the Depression: People know one another and accept one another, and although there are problems, there also is a sense of community.
It is that simple, humanistic take that helped Ebert to champion black filmmakers throughout his career. (Even Bamboozled, a film that failed to impress the critic, merited a thoughtful response, a consideration of black filmmakers and performers more generally.) Just take a look at some of the films that have topped his lists as the best in a number of years: The Color Purple (directed by Steven Spielberg, of course, but based on the novel by Alice Walker and featuring a mostly black cast), Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Hoop Dreams (also made by a white director but focused on the lives of two young black men and their families), Eve’s Bayou. Whether or not you agree with each of those choices—Ebert himself went back and acknowledged the flaws in The Color Purple, though he still maintained Whoopi Goldberg as Celie was “perfect”—there aren’t that many white critics who considered all those films even for their top 10 lists, much less for number one spots. There still exists an often unconscious ghettoizing of movies by black filmmakers as simply “black films,” not among the truly “great” ones.
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During his first term, President Obama did make climate change a priority, both in his campaign and in office. The American Clean Energy and Security Act that Congress produced passed through the House in June 2009 by a narrow margin. Yet the bill never reached a vote in the Senate, and it died quietly.
Environmentalists have been flummoxed ever since. One prominent cause-of-death theory says that large mainstream (and predominantly white) environmental groups failed to mobilize grassroots support and ignored those who bear a disproportionate burden of climate change, namely poor people of color.
With Obama in for a second term and reaffirmed in his environmental commitments, climate legislation has another chance at life. Now, observers are wondering if mainstream environmentalists learned the right lessons from the first climate bill failure and how they’ll work with people of color this time around.
To hear some environmental leaders tell it, their defeat wasn’t due to a lack of investment in black and brown people living in poor and working class communities, but to an over-investment in Obama. For example, Dan Lashof, climate and clean air director for Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), has blamed the president for having the audacity to push health-care reform and he’s pointed the finger at green groups for being too patient with Obama.
Asked what environmental advocates who led the first climate bill effort could have done differently in 2009, Bill McKibben, founder of the online grassroots organizing campaign 350.org, says their game plan was too insular. “There was no chance last time because all the action was in the closed rooms, not in the streets,” he tells Colorlines.com.
At a December 4, 2009 White House rally, third graders from Imagine Hope Community Charter School joined 1Sky, the Chesapeake Action Network and other groups to press for climate-change regulations. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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In other surprising news the water is wet. Talking Points Memo: Lawmaker Testifies NYPD Commissioner Wanted To ‘Instill Fear’ In Black And Brown Men With Stop And Frisk.
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Ever since the New York City Police Department initiated its reviled stop-and-frisk technique, the force’s laughable refrain has been that its officers are not engaging in racial profiling. It may not look like racial profiling to Mayor Michael Bloomberg or NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, who oversee stop and frisk, but to the millions of blacks and Latinos harassed by the NYPD over the years it is a blatant campaign against dark skin.
Today, a New York legislator testifying in a class-action suit against stop and frisk confirmed that those suspicious of the program’s racial motivations are correct. Doubling down on an accusation he made in 2011, New York State Senator Eric Adams said on the record that he heard Commissioner Kelly tell then-Governor David Paterson and a room of other lawmakers that stop and frisk targets minorities because “he wanted to instill fear in them that any time they leave their homes they could be targeted by police.”
Adams said he was “amazed” and “shocked” by Kelly’s alleged remarks, adding: “I told him that was illegal.”
He said Kelly responded by asking: “How else are we going to get rid of guns?”
It should be noted that 88 percent of the the people stopped and frisked turn out to be totally innocent, and that many others are guilty only of possessing a small amount of marijuana. But tough talk about guns is how Bloomberg and Kelly have been able to sustain stop and frisk despite near constant protestations.
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No, tell us what you really think. Talking Points Memo: Black Congressmen Let Loose On The GOP Vote Suppression
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Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) both appeared on a politics panel at the annual convention of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network Wednesday where they discussed an on-going assault on voting rights that could affect the African- American community in the upcoming midterm elections. Controversies over voting rights and voter suppression weren’t absent from the 2012 campaign narrative. But the dialogue coming from the mainstream media, which is dominated by white voices on both sides of the question, was inevitably different from what was on display at the NAN panel. Jeffries and Rangel both had extremely harsh words for Republicans who they described as hell bent on disenfranchising black voters — rhetoric that mixed anger with hope that Republican opponents are on the losing side of history in a rapidly changing America.
“We’re confronting the most significant and violent assault on voting rights since the advent of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” Jeffries began. “It’s taken different forms. That legislation was designed to deal with poll taxes, and the grandfather clauses, and the literacy tests, and now we have voter ID laws and a contraction or an end to early voting. But it’s designed to accomplish the same objective—suppress the right to vote, particularly in communities of color.”
Jeffries attributed this “assault on the electoral college” to a realization among some conservatives that their prospects are dimming due to the country’s increasingly diverse demographics.
“I believe that there are folks in this country on the extreme right wing that wake up each and every morning with diabolical intensity trying to figure out how they are going to advance their agenda in the most cold-blooded way possible,” said Jeffries. “They probably go to sleep dreaming about schemes and then wake up to try to execute it, because they’re facing a serious demographic challenge that threatens the viability of their capacity to get elected at the presidential level. In many states it’s moving forward because the amount of black and brown people in this country is increasing, the communities of color as a percentage of the electorate are increasing, the progressive ideals of young people regardless of color has increased and that’s a recipe for disaster for the other side.”
Reps. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), AP
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Not long ago, such an event would have been unthinkable in the battle-scarred country. But worries about attacks by Islamist militants remain. LA Times: In Somalia, music festival aims to spread peace
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Lihle Muhdin was 11 years old when he first picked up a Kalashnikov rifle, pushed into combat by an Islamist militia in Mogadishu.
That was 15 years ago. Now he wields a microphone in his fight for peace. Muhdin is a member of the Somali rap group Waayaha Cusub, or New Era, whose music calls on young Somalis to renounce violence.
"I want to tell the Somali youth, don't kill," he said. "We must stop this violence."
The 26-year-old rapper recently returned to Mogadishu after 14 years as a refugee in Kenya to be among the headliners at the Somali Reconciliation Festival, Mogadishu's first major music festival in two decades. For security reasons, the event, which opened this week, is being staged over six days in scattered venues and at different times.
In 1991, the fall of Mohamed Siad Barre's dictatorship triggered more than two decades of devastating civil war, clan battles and Islamist insurgency. Just two years ago, the musical festival would have been unthinkable.
Yet today, a cautious optimism is taking hold amid the city's blasted-out walls, collapsed rooftops and shattered neighborhoods. There is a relative calm, and as security improves week by week, the festival aims to buttress the optimism by bringing live music back to the country.
Rap group Waayaha Cusub performs at the Somali Reconciliation Festival in Mogadishu, the city's first major music festival in two decades. The musicians aim to counter Islamist militants' message of violence with one of peace. (Phil Moore / AFP/Getty Images / March 30, 2013)
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Welcome to the porch, where it's always warm, and the conversations are just fine.