I went to write valentines to refugee families Saturday. This event was a joint production of the Kansas City Public Library and Jewish Vocational Services.
Mine were not as creative as these. I just said, “I hope you will find success and happiness in Kansas City. I’m glad you are here.”
I didn’t do a selfie because I always look too goofy in photographs, but many people did.
To Immigrants with Love Letter Writing Day photo album
I got a handout at the library with a reading list of books about the immigrant/refugee experience, some fiction, some non-fiction. Unfortunately it is not online yet and I am too lazy to transcribe all 28 , but this bibliography at goodreads appears to have many of the same titles.
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Don’t forget the March for Science on April 22. The website has been updated and now has links to all of the satellite marches.
Many people are familiar with The Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences. If not you need to go check it out. Many have seen the NOVA bio-drama of the life of Percy Julian, Forgotten Genius. If you haven’t seen it, you can stream it from the NOVA website. Every February, school children learn about African American inventors and the first PhD in this discipline or that. (They do if they have good teachers anyway.)
But what if you were black in the first half of the twentieth century and you were not interested in applied science or teaching? If you wanted to do pure research, racist attitudes made it very difficult to get funding. I would like to bring attention to two truly forgotten geniuses — Ernest Everett Just and Roger Arliner Young.
Ernest E. Just, a zoologist who specialized in cytology (the study of the cell), is best known for his contributions to marine biology. While on the faculty of Howard University, he spent summers as a researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he did significant research on the fertilization of eggs of marine mammals. His studies of fertilization and of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms won international acclaim.
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Despite his professional achievements, Dr. Just felt the humiliation and the limitations imposed by racism at the Marine Biological Laboratory. After he received a large, five-year grant from the Rosenwald Foundation in 1928, Dr. Just left for Italy, where he continued his research at an institute in Naples and began to develop strong relationships with European scientists.
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In the following decade, Dr. Just made a number of extended trips to Europe to conduct research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Germany, and later at a biology institute in France. He and his second wife, a German biologist, fled France in 1939 after being interned in a prison camp by the Nazis. Dr. Just, his health failing, returned to teaching at Howard University in 1940. He died of pancreatic cancer in October 1941.
www.cpnas.org/...
I recommend the biography by Kenneth R. Manning Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just, which is available from Amazon and many public libraries.
Roger Arliner Young was a protegee of Ernest Everett Just.
Ernest Everett Just invited Young to work with him during summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts beginning in 1927. While there, they worked on researching the fertilization process in marine organisms, as well as the process of hydration and dehydration in living cells. In 1929, Young became interim department head for the zoology department at Howard University for the time while Just was in Europe seeking grant money. Young's eyes were permanently damaged by the ultraviolet rays used in the experiments conducted at Howard for Just.
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Young contributed a great deal of work to science. She studied the effects of direct and indirect radiation on sea urchin eggs, on the structures that control the salt concentration in paramecium, as well as hydration and dehydration of living cells.
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Away from Howard, her options as an African-American woman scientist were limited to teaching positions without access to research facilities and support. In the 1950s she hospitalized herself for mental health problems. Roger Arliner Young died on November 9, 1964 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
en.wikipedia.org/...