Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Five-year-old Reggie Lindsey was playing alone on the woodpile behind his grandparents' house near Little Rock, AK, one afternoon in 1962 when the overheated passions of the civil rights movement spilled over into his life. He heard a commotion out front and got to the porch in time to see a black youth approach the passenger side of a white man's truck and shoot into the window with a double-barreled shotgun. The shot missed the driver, spraying Lindsey in the head and chest from a distance of less than 15 feet. The last thing he ever saw was his grandfather running down the street to call an ambulance.
Lindsey spent the next three weeks in a coma, and a total of 10 months in the hospital. "I didn’t go home till they just gave up," he says. "They said I’d never walk or see again." They were half right. About 18 months later, he climbed down off a chair, let go, and started putting one foot in front of the other.
Still, he says, "My mother was apathetic. She thought I would never amount to anything." Despite his insistence that he would grow up to be a doctor or lawyer, she refused to send him to the school for the blind in Little Rock until a social worker convinced her he could always come home if it didn't work out.
(con't.)
In the beginning, Lindsey had his own doubts. He was the only black student in his class during the first year of integration, and even his own teacher wanted no part of him. "She put me over to the side to play with Tinker Toys while the other kids were learning," he says. Another teacher stopped two girls from escorting him to the gym on his first day, abandoning him in the hall to "wait and wait and wait" for help. "I thought maybe my mom was right," he says, "maybe I didn't belong there." But she wasn't right: Twelve years later, Reggie Lindsey graduated as the school's first black valedictorian.
From there, he went on to the University of Missouri at Rolla—one of the nation's top engineering schools. "A lot of teachers were afraid of teaching a blind student," he says. Even his advisor, who had smoothed the way for him before, questioned whether Lindsey could pass physics. But the physics professor was unfazed, asking the advisor, "Well, does he have a brain?" Lindsey answered by acing the course.
When Lindsey earned his B.S. in computer science with honors in 1982, Big Business came knocking. He was deciding between IBM and Hewlett Packard when his advisor said "a company out of Oak Ridge, Tennessee" had called. Lindsey doubted ORNL could match the IBM or Hewlett Packard offers. "But," he says, "ORNL gave me the best opportunity for what I wanted to do. At IBM it would have taken two or three years to get to that point." In January 1983, he hired on.
Today, Lindsey is responsible for maintaining ORNL's electronic mail network, enabling five email systems to communicate with each other ensuring that the 50,000 messages employees send every day can negotiate the Lab's computer highways and byways. Lindsey controls it all from a workstation that includes a PC, monitor, Braille printer, and speech synthesizer that reads aloud from the screen.......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In the 2014 midterm elections, look for more diversity among the ranks of Democrats’ political operatives. The Root: Will More Black Democratic Political Staffers Shift the Midterms’ Outcome?
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uring a press call Tuesday, Rep. Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, laid out what he sees as the Democrats’ best chance at victory in the upcoming midterm elections.
Unlike previous election cycles, when much of the party’s outreach focused almost exclusively on mobilizing key groups to go to the polls—particularly minority voters—this year Democrats are employing a new tactic: recruiting and mobilizing more minority staff.
Even though black voters are the party’s most reliable constituency, a long-standing complaint about Democratic campaigns has been that candidates only show up in the black community a couple of months before Election Day, and when they do, rarely do they have any black decision-makers from the campaigns in tow, because rarely do the campaigns have any.
To this day, only two African Americans have managed a major-party presidential campaign: Donna Brazile managed former Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, while Maggie Williams briefly managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 race. Williams replaced Patti Solis Doyle, the first and only Latina to manage a major presidential campaign. Then-Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 campaign was heavily criticized for a lack of staff diversity. And recently, Democrats faced criticism for their dismal record in hiring minority-owned consulting firms.
Donna Brazile in 2013
LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES FOR TIME INC.
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A senior doctor working at Liberia's largest hospital has died of Ebola. Voice of America: Liberian Doctor Dies of Ebola.
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The Liberian Health Ministry says Dr. Samuel Brisbane died Saturday at an Ebola treatment center on the outskirts of the capital, Monrovia.
He is the first Liberian doctor to die in an outbreak the World Health Organization says has killed 129 people in the country.
The U.S. based aid group Samaritan's Purse said Saturday an American doctor working in Liberia is also sick.
A spokeswoman for the group says Dr. Kent Brantly is undergoing intensive medical treatment. She says patients have a better chance of survival if they receive treatment immediately after being infected, which Brantly did.
The World Health Organization says highly contagious Ebola virus has killed at least 672 people in four African countries this year.
In this 2014 photo provided by the Samaritan's Purse aid organization, Dr. Kent Brantly, left, treats an Ebola patient at the Samaritan's Purse Ebola Case Management Center in Monrovia, Liberia.
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Good news. Uganda's Constitutional Court has annulled tough anti-gay legislation signed into law in February. BBC: Uganda court annuls anti-homosexuality law.
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It ruled that the bill was passed by MPs in December without the requisite quorum and was therefore illegal.
Homosexual acts were already illegal, but the new law allowed for life imprisonment for "aggravated homosexuality" and banned the "promotion of homosexuality".
Several donors have cut aid to Uganda since the law was adopted.
Uganda is a deeply conservative society where many people oppose gay rights and the sentence for homosexual acts has always been life imprisonment.
Earlier drafts of the anti-homosexuality act made it a crime not to report gay people - which would have made it impossible to live as openly gay - but this clause was removed.
However the legislation that was passed in parliament was "null and void", the presiding judge at the Constitutional Court said, as not enough lawmakers had been present to vote on the bill.
Some gay Ugandans have fled the country, saying they are being persecuted
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Welcome to my hometown! BBC: Sudan 'apostasy' woman Meriam Ibrahim arrives in US.
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Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag arrived in New Hampshire on Thursday evening with her American husband and her children. Welcoming her on a brief stopover in Philadelphia, the city's mayor, Michael Nutter, described her as a "world freedom fighter".
There was global condemnation when she was sentenced to hang for apostasy by a Sudanese court earlier this year. Mrs Ibrahim's father is Muslim so according to Sudan's version of Islamic law she is also Muslim and cannot convert. She maintains she was never Muslim having been raised by her Christian mother.
Mrs Ibrahim flew from Rome to Philadelphia with her husband and two children, en route to Manchester, New Hampshire, where her husband has relatives and the family hope to settle. While in Philadelphia, Mr Nutter said people would remember her just like "others who stood up so we could be free". He compared her to Rosa Parks, who became a symbol of the civil rights movement in the US when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Alabama. And he presented Mrs Ibrahim with a small replica of the Liberty Bell, a symbol of American independence.
Her next stop was Manchester, and there were about 40 relatives and supporters at the airport to greet her, some of them chanting "Long Live America", says the BBC's Gringo Wotshela, who was at the scene.
Meriam Ibrahim with family
Mrs Ibrahim's husband is next to her on the left, in this family photo
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A single photo focused the world’s attention on Sudan in 93. As Gaza and MH17 dominate, Africa’s horrors remain largely invisible. The Guardian: We must not look away from the crises in Africa.
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In the photograph a little girl is hunched low, head bent to the ground, ribs jutting out from a too-small body wasting away from starvation. A few feet behind her, a vulture waits, avid and focused, for her to die. When this photograph, taken in southern Sudan in 1993 by the late photojournalist Kevin Carter, was published, the outcry from the public was immediate and visceral. Questions of ethics, and inquiries on how to help, flooded the New York Times. The Pulitzer prize-winning photo riveted the world and directed attention to the devastating famine in the country.
As controversial as the picture was, as problematic as it may have been for Carter to shoot it while the young girl sat, helpless prey to a vulture, the image sparked worldwide interest in the famine. People noticed and, suddenly, people cared.
Now, three years after independence, South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, is expected to declare that it is once again in a state of famine. The crisis has been caused by conflict between government forces and various opposition groups. Four million people are facing emergency levels of food shortages. One and a half million have been displaced and 50,000 children are at risk of death from malnutrition.
The situation has been called the most rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis today, but without an image startling enough to make the headlines, it has remained invisible. The world’s gaze is being directed elsewhere, towards the devastating news emerging daily from Gaza and the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
South Sudan is not the only African nation in crisis. There is also the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The three cases share one striking similarity: not enough attention is being paid to what’s going on. In trying to explain why, journalists blame the lack of bureau offices outside key cities in a few countries. Some point to news outlets’ financial struggles, and the shrinking number of journalists conducting immersive stories. Time is too short, money too tight, people too few.
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No, these couples aren’t interracial. But black Americans in interethnic relationships say they have their own unique set of challenges and lessons to learn. The Root: United in Complexion and Love, but a Culture Apart.
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At first glance you might guess by their deep-chocolate complexions, matching warm smiles and coordinated traditional attire that Charlotte Fadare and her husband, Olusola Fadare, have everything in common.
But the truth is, these newlyweds come from vastly different worlds, continents apart, and have spent much of their marriage bridging the cultural divide between their two backgrounds.
A year ago this month, the couple merged her Southern African-American heritage and his Yoruba Nigerian traditions through a 250-person, fusion wedding and reception in Baltimore. There was traditional Western and African wedding attire, a symbolic jump over a broom at the altar, Yoruban dishes alongside soul food options and a procession to Nigerian pop.
After the father-daughter dance ended and “Wobble Baby” blared over the reception-hall speakers, the bride’s side immediately rushed to the floor to dance to what’s become an African-American party staple, while many of the groom’s friends and relatives were left confused about what the fuss was about. It was immediately evident that the hit song wasn’t as big in Nigeria.
“It looked like confusion, so that was kind of funny,” Charlotte Fadare, 26, remembers.
Beryl Harold, who immigrated to New York City from Jamaica at 10 years old, recalls a similar wedding-reception experience. A couple of days post-honeymoon, she received a phone call from her new African-American sister-in-law, a devout Southern Baptist who was unfamiliar with Jamaica’s dancehall and reggae scene. The concerned new relative reported that she’d been so “aghast” at the sensual “dolla wine”-ing to artists like Sean Paul and Shabba Ranks that she’d fled the dance floor—and the wedding itself—early, with kids in tow.
Differences in dance styles and musical preferences are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the questions and complications that black intercultural (also called interethnic) couples encounter when blending cultures in the name of love. One day they might be managing resistance from family and friends whose ethnic biases mean their life partners inspire skepticism. On another, they’re making adjustments to accommodate each other’s cultural mores in areas ranging from food to education to gender roles. The issues they grapple with are daily reminders of the diversity of the black experience in the United States, and their relationships seem almost like microcosms of all its challenges and richness.
Charlotte and Olusola Fadare with their newborn daughter
COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE FADARE
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