Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Darnell Diggs and his twin sister are the youngest of 15 children who grew up in the small Alabama town of Brundidge to parents who did not finish high school. Their parents did value education. "Our parents inspired us to work hard at school, and if you didn't, you got disciplined. That was encouragement enough," Diggs recalls.
Thirty-four-year-old Darnell is now Dr. Diggs, a physicist working at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Most of his siblings have at least undergraduate degrees in areas as diverse as chemistry, math, physics, business, and education.
Diggs was a 2004 Black Engineer of the Year Award winner in the "Promising Scientist in Government" category. He was also named one of the 50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science in 2004 by Science Spectrum magazine.
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During his high school days Diggs was first-chair trumpet player in the school band and was in the ROTC. He preferred biology to the physical sciences and planned to become a physician. Yet when he went off to Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black school near Huntsville in Normal, Alabama, he took a cousin's advice and began to study business, hoping to prepare for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) on the side.
That all changed during the final semester of his sophomore year, when he took a required physical sciences class for nonscience majors. The instructor of that class told Diggs he was in the wrong field and that he ought to be majoring in physics. He even offered to help Diggs obtain a scholarship if he tried studying physics. Having paid for his schooling on grants and loans up to that point, the offer of a scholarship was enticing. Diggs enjoyed the physical science course, so he decided to take the instructor up on his offer.
But Diggs found inspiration in a book entitled Gifted Hands by Ben Carson, an African-American who grew up in inner-city Detroit and at age 33 became the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Diggs identified with Carson, who had to struggle to overcome many of the same hurdles Diggs did, and drew motivation from Carson's story.
With Carson's book in mind, Diggs dug in for the comprehensive final and came through with a grade high enough to pass the course. That academic near-death experience gave him the resolve to struggle on, although it was not an easy path.
[...]
As graduation approached, Diggs thought about what he was going to do for the rest of his life. During that period of introspection, he attended a seminar at the National Conference of Black Physics Students that discussed the low numbers of black graduate students in physics. The attendees were encouraged to go to graduate school if they were able, and Diggs decided to give it a shot. He was admitted to the master's program in physics, also at Alabama A&M, on the condition that he do well academically. The focus of his master's studies was fiber optics. He enjoyed graduate school and his grades continued to improve. By the time he received his master's degree in physics, his grade point average was 3.5, a considerable increase from the 2.7 at the beginning of his graduate career.......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Ohio Republicans keeps trying to cut early voting and the federal courts keep striking the cuts down. The Nation: Ohio Early Voting Cuts Violate the Voting Rights Act.
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Last year, Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature cut a week of early voting and eliminated the “Golden Week” when voters can register and vote on the same day during the early voting period. GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted also issued a directive prohibiting early voting on the two days before the election, and on weekends and nights in the preceding weeks—the times when it’s most convenient to vote.
[Thursday] a federal court in Ohio issued a preliminary injunction against the early voting cuts, which it said violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, ordering Ohio to restore early voting opportunities before the midterms. “African Americans in Ohio are more likely than other groups to utilize [early] voting in general and to rely on evening and Sunday voting hours,” wrote District Court Judge Peter Economus, a Clinton appointee. As a consequence, the early voting cuts “result in fewer voting opportunities for African Americans.”
The lawsuit was brought by the ACLU and the Ohio NAACP. In 2012, 157,000 Ohioans cast ballots during early voting hours eliminated by the Ohio GOP. Overall, 600,000 Ohioans, 10 percent of the electorate, voted early in 2012.
Blacks in Ohio were far more likely than whites to vote early in 2008 and 2012. “In the November 2008 election in [Cleveland’s] Cuyahoga County, African-Americans voted early in person at a rate over twenty times greater than white voters,” according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. In cities like Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton blacks voted early in numbers far exceeding their percentage of the population.
Early voting in Ohio in 2012. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan)
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Sometimes you have to call it like you see it. The New Republic: The War on Obamacare Has Become a War on Minorities and the Poor.
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As University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley noted on Tuesday, a conservative victory in Halbig would eliminate subsidies for everyone, but the hardship exemption would only apply to a subset. Many, many people—those above about 180 percent of the federal poverty level—would still be required to purchase insurance. It would just become more expensive for them. The exemption—the escape hatch to freedom—would only be available to those whose coverage costs more than eight percent of income: the poor, and near-poor. These are the people whose liberty conservatives claim to be fighting for—the people who were only able to purchase insurance because the subsidies made it affordable. The people who, as Bagley writes, would “be free to decline coverage that, without tax credits, they can’t afford anyhow.”
This kind of post hoc appeal to liberty long predates the Affordable Care Act, but it has become particularly salient in the fight against Obamacare as enrollment has grown and weakened traditional tools of opposition. When the Supreme Court made the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion optional back in 2012, it vouchsafed an old but typically losing conservative argument that using federal spending as an incentive to force state action can be unconstitutionally coercive—a freedom-crushing blow against states' rights. But the freedom the Court upheld two years ago looks, in effect, an awful lot like the freedom the challengers in Halbig claim to be fighting for. In both cases there’s something conspicuous about the people to whom these strange conceptions of liberty apply.
Kaiser Family Foundation
As of early April, per this Kaiser Family Foundation map, 19 states remained fully unwilling to consider Medicaid expansion. In the weeks since, Wyoming and Tennessee joined Utah and Indiana among GOP-controlled states working toward expanding Medicaid. So the chips are slowly falling. But they are falling along fairly predictable racial and income lines.
Tennessee was a genuine surprise, in that it isn’t lily white, and has fairly high rates of poverty. But the GOP-controlled states that have expanded Medicaid, or are considering Medicaid expansion, are pretty white relative to GOP-controlled states where expansion is out of the question. Deep Southern states, where poverty is most concentrated and black population rates approach 30 percent, aren’t calling up the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington to negotiate a conservative Medicaid expansion compromise. To the contrary, that's probably where resistance to the expansion runs strongest.
The story won’t be much different if conservatives get their way and ACA subsidies disappear in Healthcare.gov states. If you haven’t caught on by now, the conspicuous thing about the Medicaid freedmen and those who would be freed from the individual mandate is that they’re disproportionately black and poor. ACA rejectionism isn't enhancing their liberty at all.
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Conservatives are appalled by changes to the AP U.S. history exam. Which is funny, because the changes are hardly revolutionary. Slate: Don’t Know Much Revisionist History.
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History education doesn’t matter because of particular names and dates; it matters because history is one way we understand ourselves and our place in the world. If the Sons of Confederate Veterans believe in the myth of the black Confederate, it’s because they also believe in the nobility of their predecessors, and the two are connected. Likewise, if historians want to strike Masoff’s sentence from the record (which they eventually did), it’s because they’re committed to giving kids a fuller—and sometimes unflattering—story of Virginia’s history.
But history has always been a clash for control of the narrative—a place where we fight to define our identity. Given the stakes, conflict is inevitable, even when the tweaks are minor. Take Advanced Placement United States history. A university-style course for ambitious high-schoolers, it’s managed by the College Board, which prepares the year-end test and issues guidelines for teaching the course. Last month, the College Board released a new “curriculum framework” to help teachers shape material and prepare their students for the test. “In line with college and university U.S. history survey courses’ increased focus on early and recent American history and decreased emphasis on other areas,” explains the College Board, “the AP U.S. History course expands on the history of the Americas from 1491 to 1607 and from 1980 to the present.”
I took the test. It wasn’t a left-wing tirade against the nation’s sins.
The particular change is a greater focus on women and minorities, with thematic questions like “How have gender, class, ethnic, religious, regional, and other group identities changed in different eras?” and “How and why have moral, philosophical, and cultural values changed in what would become the United States?” At the end of the course, students are expected to do things like “Explain how conceptions of group identity and autonomy emerged out of cultural interactions between colonizing groups, Africans, and American Indians in the colonial era” and “Explain how the U.S. involvement in global conflicts in the 20th century set the stage for domestic social changes.”
History teachers aside, most of the rest of the world shrugged. But conservatives noticed, and they were furious. The framework, resolved the Republican National Committee, is a “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation's history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.”
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After 20 years of restoration, Villa Lewaro has been returned to its original grandeur. The Root: Madam C.J. Walker’s Restored Estate Recaptures a Grand History.
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The Trust, as they like to call it, was hosting a media tour of Villa Lewaro, the official name for the upstate New York estate of Madam C.J. Walker, the first self-made black female millionaire. Walker was a business pioneer who amassed her fortune developing beauty and hair products for black women.
Her estate, completed in 1918, is privately owned. The current owners, Harold and Helena Doley, have spent the last 20 years restoring the home. "It's beautiful," the woman promised, just to entice me.
I headed to Google Images. Black history never ceases to amaze me.
The 20,000-square-foot "house" is gorgeous by today's standards, which means it was phenomenal in its day. It's also phenomenal because a black woman born in 1867, whose parents and older siblings had been enslaved, started at the bottom and built it. The mansion—not that far down the road from the Rockefellers'—comes with an elevator, a view of the Palisades and the surround sound of its heyday.
Villa Lewaro in Irvington, N.Y.
WIKIPEDIA
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Remembering Black Journal host William Greaves and the black power movement that spawned a generation of public-affairs programs. The Root: Remember When Black TV Programs Were Angry and Unapologetic?
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When I was growing up in a northern-New Jersey ghetto in the early Afro-picked 1970s, my mom used to take me places in her car. Our radio dial was locked to 1430 WNJR, a soul AM station, and in the afternoons I would hear something at the top of the hour called “National Black Network News.” National black newscasters were talking about the condition of black people.
We don’t hear enough of that anymore.
I was reminded of that when I heard that William Greaves had passed away on Aug. 25 at the age of 87. Nearly 50 years ago, Greaves was fighting a war in the media world and we were all the beneficiaries. The skirmishes were over black public-affairs television programs—shows that presented undiluted African-American political, social and cultural views on white television during the height of the civil rights movement and black power eras. Greaves was a pioneer of one: Black Journal.
In 1968, more than 100 cities had caught aflame after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The Kerner Commission Report had just been released, and its media chapter explained that the virtually all-white news media were complicit in making black people invisible. Across the nation, virtually all of major-market television responded--local and national, commercial and public—with black public-affairs television shows—programs that would reflect the black experience.
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