Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Jewel Plummer Cobb (born 1924), a cell biologist and cell physiologist, and largely known for her work with skin pigment and melanin, has encouraged women and ethnic minorities to enter the sciences. An educator and researcher, she contributed to the field of chemotherapy with her research on how drugs affected cancer cells.
Cobb was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 17, 1924, and spent her childhood as an only child. She is from the third generation of the Plummer family who sought a career in medical science. Her grandfather, a freed slave, graduated from Howard University in 1898 and became a pharmacist. Her father, Frank V. Plummer, became a physician after he graduated from Cornell University, where he helped found the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. Her mother, Carriebel (Cole) Plummer, taught dance and was a physical education teacher.
Becoming a noted cell biologist was a difficult road for Cobb. Because she was African American, she faced segregation during the course of her education. Although she came from an upper-middle-class background, Cobb found that she had to go to black Chicago public schools. Cobb was in constant contact with African American professionals and was well aware of their accomplishments. She decided not to let anything stand in the way of her own success.
Supplementing her education with books from her father's library, Cobb had access to scientific journals and magazines, current event periodicals, and materials on successful African Americans. Although Cobb was at first interested in becoming a physical education teacher like her mother and aunt, she found that she was interested in biology when, in her sophomore year in high school, she studied cells through a microscope. An honors student, Cobb showed academic promise. She had a solid education and a drive to learn.
Although her interest in biology could have led her to become a medical doctor, Cobb was not interested in working directly with the sick. She was, nonetheless, interested in the theory of disease, an interest that later led her to become one of the leading cancer researchers in the United States
When it came time to enroll in college, Cobb selected the University of Michigan. Due to the segregation of the dormitories at the university, all African Americans, regardless of their year of study, were forced to live in one house. In disgust at the racism still found there, Cobb left the University of Michigan after three semesters and earned her B.A. in biology from traditionally black Talladega College in Alabama.
Cobb applied for a teaching fellowship at New York University. Because of her race, she was at first turned down for the position. Cobb refused to accept the rejection and personally visited the college, which then accepted her because her credentials were so impressive. In 1945, Cobb started her career in teaching as a fellow there. In 1947, she earned an M.S. in cell physiology and in 1950 she earned a Ph.D. in cell physiology from New York University. Her dissertation was titled "Mechanisms of Pigment Formation."
Cobb was named an independent investigator for the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1949. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cancer Research Foundation of Harlem Hospital and at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, show how separate and unequal education is coming back. The Atlantic: Segregation Now ...
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There was a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Central High School homecoming parade brought out the city. The parade started in the former state capital’s lively downtown and seemed to go on for miles. The horns of one of the state’s largest marching bands, some 150 members strong, would bounce off the antebellum mansions along the streets. Revelers—young and old, black and white, old money and no money—crowded the sidewalks to watch the elaborate floats and cheer a football team feared across the region.
Central was not just a renowned local high school. It was one of the South’s signature integration success stories. In 1979, a federal judge had ordered the merger of the city’s two largely segregated high schools into one. The move was clumsy and unpopular, but its consequences were profound. Within a few years, Central emerged as a powerhouse that snatched up National Merit Scholarships and math-competition victories just as readily as it won trophies in football, track, golf. James Dent’s daughter Melissa graduated from Central in 1988, during its heyday, and went on to become the first in her family to graduate from college.
But on that sunlit day last October, as Dent searched for Melissa’s daughter in the procession coming into view, he saw little to remind him of that era. More caravan than parade, Central’s homecoming pageant consisted of a wobbly group of about 30 band members, some marching children from the nearby elementary schools, and a dozen or so cars with handwritten signs attached to their sides. The route began in the predominantly black West End and ended a few blocks later, just short of the railroad tracks that divide that community from the rest of the city.
The reason for the decline of Central’s homecoming parade is no secret. In 2000, another federal judge released Tuscaloosa City Schools from the court-ordered desegregation mandate that had governed it for a single generation. Central had successfully achieved integration, the district had argued—it could be trusted to manage that success going forward.
Freed from court oversight, Tuscaloosa’s schools have seemed to move backwards in time. The citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. Central retains the name of the old powerhouse, but nothing more. A struggling school serving the city’s poorest part of town, it is 99 percent black. D’Leisha, an honors student since middle school, has only marginal college prospects. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to Central have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools.
James Dent began his education soon after the Brown decision, but never attended school with a single white classmate.
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Seemingly every time they talk about the Obama coalition, conservative dolts reveal a disturbing bias. Here's why. Salon: The right’s new racial math: How its view of nonwhite voters got so demented.
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The news is so depressing for conservatives these days. All the demographic trends are moving against them.With every election showing a large majority of single women, young people and people of color voting for the Democrats, thus solidifying their identification with the party, the less likely it is that Republicans can outrun the shift to a multiracial majority. But they still don’t seem to understand exactly what this means for them.
Take, for example, Michael Medved’s latest in the Wall Street Journal in which he explains that the Democrats’ strategy of wooing women voters by pointing out the GOP’s hostility to reproductive rights and equal pay is nothing but a sham. Sure, Barack Obama won the female vote by a commanding 11 points in the last election but it’s not as if he won a mandate for his message. After all, he lost the white female vote:
A closer look at the numbers reveals that Mr. Obama’s success with the ladies actually stemmed from his well-known appeal to minority voters. In 2012, 72% of all women voters identified themselves as “white.” This subset preferred Mitt Romney by a crushing 14-point advantage, 56% to 42%. Though Democrats ratcheted up the women’s rhetoric in the run-up to Election Day, the party did poorly among the white women it sought to influence: The Republican advantage in this crucial segment of the electorate doubled to 14 points in 2012 from seven points in 2008. In the race against Mr. Romney, Obama carried the overall female vote—and with it the election—based solely on his success with the 28% of women voters who identified as nonwhite. He carried 76% of Latina women and a startling 96% of black women.
The same discrepancy exists when considering marital status. In 2012, nearly 60% of female voters were married, and they preferred Mr. Romney by six points, 53% to 46%. Black and Latina women, on the other hand, are disproportionately represented among unmarried female voters, and they favored Mr. Obama by more than 2-to-1, 67% to 31%.
A similar pattern emerges among young voters, suggesting the president’s popularity among millennials also came from racial minorities, not any special resonance with young people. While nonwhites compose 28% of the electorate-at-large, they make up 42% of voters ages 18-29. Mr. Obama won these young voters handily—60% to 37%. He lost young white voters by seven points, 51% to 44%.
If the majority of women who vote for Democrats are young, single and black or brown, how can anyone say the war on women was a legitimate issue? True, those votes do come in mighty handy Election Day but let’s take a look at the reality: If young, female racial minorities couldn’t vote, the Republicans would win in a landslide!
I’m sure this makes them feel better. The right women are all on their side. Well, actually it’s just a small majority, even by that unfortunate standard: 46 percent of white women went with the Democrats so I wouldn’t be too sure that they’ve got them quite as locked up as Medved supposes.
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Fifty years ago this week a rogue civil rights activists tried to shut down the New York World’s Fair.
Slate: “A Gun to the Heart of the City”.
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The 1964 World’s Fair was expected to enrich New York city and state coffers and would surely be the greatest in history, Robert Moses and his public relations staff repeatedly reminded New Yorkers. Mayor Robert F. Wagner and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller could only hope so; there was a lot riding on the two-year exhibition. Not only would portions of the opening ceremonies be televised, but the White House also informed Moses just a couple of weeks before opening day that President Lyndon Johnson would attend the festivities to deliver the keynote address. New York’s political leadership would be in the spotlight, which could be particularly beneficial to Rockefeller, who hoped to challenge Johnson at the polls in November.
While New York and its leaders prepared for the influx of tourists eager to see the fair’s gleaming Space Age pavilions, life in the ghettos of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant went unchanged: crumbling tenements, violent crime, joblessness, run-down public schools, and police brutality, which often went unpunished and unreported (with the notable exception of the black press). Young activists, many of whom hailed from such neighborhoods, grew more militant as disillusionment set in. “They don’t want us on the streets because the World’s Fair and all their friends are coming!” complained one young Harlemite.
It was in this atmosphere that the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality planned a grand gesture, one immense act of civil disobedience that would command the attention of not only Mayor Wagner, Gov. Rockefeller, and Moses, but also of the media and all of New York City. If the gesture were grand enough—and yes, theatrical enough—it would grab the attention of the president and Congress, indeed the entire political establishment of the nation, the very people who had so egregiously ignored the demand for racial justice for so long.
Louis E. Lomax had first raised the notion of a World’s Fair stall-in back in July 1963, during a speech at Queens College. He called for 500 drivers to make their way to the fair in their automobiles and, by running out of gas or simply stopping on the way there, create a traffic jam of historical proportions. Moses’ beloved network of newly renovated highways would be used as a roadblock, preventing tens of thousands from attending his fair. Brooklyn CORE now seized on Lomax’s suggestion: The World’s Fair would be its target.
CORE picketers march in the shadow of the Unisphere at the 1964 World's Fair.
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Heartbreaking is the only way to describe the devastation in Queens, NYC Easter morning, when a fire killed two 4-year-old children, and it took some emergency personnel 21 minutes to respond. The Grio: Is 911 ‘still a joke’ for African-Americans?
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Firefighters had to take the limp bodies of the two children out of the burning house. And what is truly outrageous is that it took the ambulance 21 minutes after the 911 call was made to arrive at the scene—14 minutes to dispatch the ambulance, and another seven to drive to the home. The fire started before 11:50 p.m. the night before Easter, and a neighbor called 911 at 11:51 p.m. Fire trucks arrived on the scene at 11:56 p.m. and called the dispatcher at 11:57 p.m. And yet, the ambulances were not dispatched until 12:05 am, the first one arriving at 12:12 a.m.
An investigation is underway, with the New York Times pointing to a breakdown in communications between the firefighters and the emergency dispatchers. How and when the breakdown occurred is unknown, but what is known is that when firefighters arrive at a scene, the ambulance is called and dispatched immediately. That did not happen, and obviously somebody messed up. The time lag had deadly consequences.
Sadly, the whole thing should reminds you of that 1990 Public Enemy song called “911 Is a Joke.” For a refresher, here are some of the lyrics:
Hit me
Going, going, gone
Now I dialed 911 a long time ago
Don’t you see how late they’re reactin’
They only come and they come when they wanna
So get the morgue embalm the goner
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