Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Bessie Blount was born on November 24th in 1914, in Hickory, Virginia. Little is known of her family or her childhood but it is known that she had long wanted to work in the medical field. Blount left home and traveled north to New Jersey to become a physical therapist. She studied at both Panzar College of Physical Education and at Union Junior College. Then she moved on to Chicago where she finished her training.
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Then came World War II, and it had left many people severely disabled. It was while working with amputees that inventive ideas were cultivated to assist her patients in regaining their independence. By 1951 Blount was living in Newark, New Jersey and teaching Physical Therapy at the Bronx Hospital in New York. She taught people to do the work that their feet and hands once did. Eating was a great challenge for many of the people that she was working with. To assist disabled people in gaining greater independence she invented a device that delivered food through a tube, one bite at a time, to a mouthpiece that could be used whether the patient was sitting up or lying down. When the person wanted more food they just bit down on the tube and it signaled a machine to send the next morsel.
This electric self-feeding devise eventually was donated to France. In 1951, she patented a simpler device called a "portable receptacle support" which also allowed people to feed themselves. It used a brace around the neck to support a bowl, cup or dish. Blount also appeared on the Philadelphia television show “The Big Idea” in 1953. Becoming the first Black and the first woman to be given such recognition.
While her inventions had the potential to revolutionize the lives of many people, getting them patented and marketed for use by patients was not easy in the United States. Frustrated by the lack of interest by the American Veteran’s Administration, Blount signed the rights to her other inventions over to the French government with the statement that she had proven "that a Black woman can invent something for the benefit of humankind." Around this time she became a close friend of Theodore M. Edison the son of the Thomas Alva Edison the electric light inventor.....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Marcus Franklin refocuses the distorting lens of mainstream media with intimate portraits of black dads and their kids. Color Lines: A New Image of Black Fatherhood [PHOTOS].
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In June of 2013 I started photographing black men and their children and created The Fatherhood Project, the online home for photos that capture them in ordinary moments. A single dad helping his daughter with math homework during a break at work. A dad teaching his daughter how to walk as they wait to see a doctor. A father and son chilling on a stoop.
Why photograph black men and their children? What’s extraordinary about these subjects?
For starters, black men taking care of our children is, on some level, revolutionary—and a form of resistance to the legacies of laws and other tools used to hinder our ability to parent. During the trans-Atlantic slave trade, for example, fathers were routinely separated from their children as family members were sold. And currently, disproportionately and consistently high incarceration and unemployment rates for black men have made it difficult, if not impossible for many to parent. There’s also the disproportionately high rate of homicide among black men, whether by people in their own communities or at the hands of the state. My own father was murdered by a cop a couple of weeks before my 15th birthday.
As New York Times writer Brent Staples asked in a tweet this past Fathers’ Day: “Imagine yourself jailed on a low-level Rockefeller-era drug charge. Now a felon: denied a job, housing and the vote. How would you ‘Father’”
And yet, even in neighborhoods like my Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, home, beset with problems such as disinvestment and militaristic policing, you see black men parenting or at least making earnest efforts to do so. Some are parenting children who aren’t biologically related to them, too. You see them walking their children to school or picking them up; teaching a son or daughter the fundamentals of basketball on an outdoor court; or simply enjoying a morning breeze on the stoop with an infant son. Ordinary moments that crush white media narratives and stereotypes about black fathers.
Giovanni and 9-month-old Ethan chill on their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn stoop. All photos by Marcus Franklin
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When it comes to racially lopsided arrests, the most remarkable thing about Ferguson, Mo., might be just how ordinary it is. USA Today: Racial gap in U.S. arrest rates: 'Staggering disparity'
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Police in Ferguson — which erupted into days of racially charged unrest after a white officer killed an unarmed black teen — arrest black people at a rate nearly three times higher than people of other races.
At least 1,581 other police departments across the USA arrest black people at rates even more skewed than in Ferguson, a USA TODAY analysis of arrest records shows. That includes departments in cities as large and diverse as Chicago and San Francisco and in the suburbs that encircle St. Louis, New York and Detroit.
Those disparities are easier to measure than they are to explain. They could be a reflection of biased policing; they could just as easily be a byproduct of the vast economic and educational gaps that persist across much of the USA — factors closely tied to crime rates. In other words, experts said, the fact that such disparities exist does little to explain their causes.
"That does not mean police are discriminating. But it does mean it's worth looking at. It means you might have a problem, and you need to pay attention," said University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, a leading expert on racial profiling.
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The family of the late Jamaican reggae artist, Bob Marley has launched what they describe as the world's first global cannabis brand. BBC: Bob Marley family launches "first world cannabis brand".
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It will be called Marley Natural and be used to sell cannabis-infused lotions, creams and various accessories.
The new brand is being developed with Privateer Holdings based in Washington state, stressing the life and legacy of Jamaica's greatest cultural export.
It is intended to be sold in the US and possibly worldwide from next year.
Bob Marley's daughter, Cedella Marley, said her father would welcome the move.
"My dad would be so happy to see people understanding the healing power of the herb," she said.
Privateer's chief executive Brendan Kennedy said a Marley was "someone who, in many ways, helped start the movement to end cannabis prohibition 50 years ago.
Bob Marley's image presides over a medical marijuana farmer's market in California
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Challenging elitism, racism, and obesity with a grocery store may sound crazy. Here’s what happened when Whole Foods tried to do it in Detroit. Slate: Can Whole Foods Change the Way Poor People Eat?
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“We’re coming to confront the disconnect between the accessibility and the affordability in healthy food,” declared Walter Robb, the co-CEO of Whole Foods, in an early 2012 address to Detroit business leaders. There would be lower prices, too, to make the store accessible to “all of Detroit.” Robb’s nod to the growing dietary gap between rich and poor was surprising for a man leading a company known for appealing to white, monied foodies. That April, he went even further. Addressing corporate leaders at the Milken Institute Global Conference, Robb said that at the Detroit store “we’re going after elitism. We’re going after racism.” And real success, Robb told me later, would include seeing that “health outcomes are being improved” in Detroit.
Those were big goals for any supermarket, but they were especially a stretch for Whole Foods. First lady Michelle Obama’s initiative to open new supermarkets in order to expand access to healthy foods has made it commonplace for grocers to talk about health, but it is unusual for grocers to talk about lowering prices to make healthy food more accessible. Whole Foods would almost certainly need to do that in Detroit, where more than one-third of the city lives below the poverty line. What’s more, Whole Foods’ central conceit as a company is that it sells only the best, healthiest food—which sometimes requires paying more. The Detroit store marked the grocer’s first big experiment testing whether lower-income shoppers like Ruff—a public employee with a master’s degree in social work, she is roughly middle class but sometimes struggles to pay her bills—would find that line of reasoning persuasive.
As Whole Foods prepared to open in Detroit in June 2013 tension over the city’s future was becoming palpable. Historically, racial and income inequality have broken down along the city limits, with poor, black residents in the city and rich, white residents in the suburbs, said John Patrick Leary, an assistant professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit who frequently writes about the city’s equity issues. But as middle- and upper-class residents have moved to the city while the poor stayed poor, he said, Detroit was “becoming more of a normal city like Chicago or New York, where the superficial trappings of middle-class life are concentrated in a place where you can pretend you’re surrounded by it.” Would the store serve the audience Robb implied: the city’s working class and poor, nearly all of them black, constituting the majority of the city? Or would it fall back on its base, and just serve the influx of upwardly mobile, mostly white professionals and creatives?
Before Ruff’s first visit to Whole Foods last June, she wasn’t sure what to expect. Usually, she shopped at Aldi’s, a discount store where it took a quarter to unlock a shopping cart, and entering the store required walking past an aisle stacked 6 feet high with cookies and budget wine. For produce, she went to Randazzo’s, a local Italian market. Ruff expected Whole Foods to be a cross between Randazzo’s and Sam’s Club. When she walked in she was surprised and overwhelmed.
“It’s kind of intimidating to go in there and shop,” Ruff told me. “I just kind of walked around, but a lot of the stuff didn’t appeal to me,” she said. She didn’t see much difference—besides price—between Whole Foods’ groceries and what she bought at Aldi’s. And while many shoppers were black, as is Ruff, nearly everyone wore professional or stylish attire (or hospital scrubs); she was in a T-shirt and sweats.
After church, Toyoda Ruff stops at a gas station with her family to grab some snacks before heading home, on Oct. 12.
Photo by Marcin Szczepanski
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community Front Porch!
Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.