Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
African-American engineer and inventor Lonnie George Johnson was born in Alabama in 1949. He earned his master's degree in nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University, and went on to work for the U.S. Air Force and the NASA space program. After tinkering with the invention of a high-powered water gun, Johnson's Super Soaker became a top-selling item by the early 1990s. He has since been developing the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter (JTEC), an engine that converts heat directly into electricity.
Lonnie George Johnson was born on October 6, 1949, in Mobile, Alabama. His father was a World War II veteran who worked as a civilian driver at nearby Air Force bases, while his mother worked in a laundry and as a nurse's aid. During the summers, both of Johnson's parents also picked cotton on his grandfather's farm.
Out of both interest and economic necessity, Johnson's father was a skilled handyman who taught his children to build their own toys. When Johnson was still a small boy, he and his dad built a pressurized chinaberry shooter out of bamboo shoots. At the age of 13, Johnson attached a lawnmower engine to a go-kart he built from junkyard scraps and raced it along the highway until the police pulled him over.
Johnson dreamed of becoming a famous inventor and, during his teenage years, began to grow more curious about the way things worked and more ambitious in his experimentation—sometimes to the detriment of his family. "Lonnie tore up his sister's baby doll to see what made the eyes close," his mother later recalled. Another time, he nearly burned the house down when he attempted to cook up rocket fuel in one of his mother's saucepans and the concoction exploded.
Growing up in Mobile in the days of legal segregation, Johnson attended Williamson High School, an all-black facility, where, despite his precocious intelligence and creativity, he was told not to aspire beyond a career as a technician. Nevertheless, inspired by the story of famed African-American inventor George Washington Carver, Johnson persevered in his dream of becoming an inventor.
Nicknamed "The Professor" by his high school buddies, Johnson represented his school at a 1968 science fair sponsored by the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS). The fair took place at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where, just five years earlier, Governor George Wallace had tried to prevent two black students from enrolling at the school by standing in the doorway of the auditorium.
The only black student in the competition, Johnson debuted a compressed-air-powered robot, called "the Linex," that he had painstakingly built from junkyard scraps over the course of a year. Much to the chagrin of the university officials, Johnson won first prize. "The only thing anybody from the university said to us during the entire competition," Johnson later recalled, "was 'Goodbye' and 'Y'all drive safe, now.'".......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Atlanta is considering fines not jail for recreational weed. But decriminalization uncoupled FROM ChangeD policies on arrest quotas, financial incentives & racial profiling, will go up in smoke. Color Lines: Why Weed Decriminalization Alone Won't Fix Racist Drug Enforcement
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Hidden amid the smoke clouds of last week’s National Weed Day was a decision by the city of Atlanta to put off a vote on marijuana decriminalization. Ordinarily, local legislative procedures wouldn’t warrant much attention, but for a city once at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, the issue has become a proxy for a broader debate about racist policing and the measures needed to change it.
The policy debate started three months ago, when two plainclothes Atlanta policemen smelled marijuana coming from the car of a young Black man named Deaundre Phillips. As documented on surveillance video, the cops proceeded to shoot and kill Deaundre on the spot, etching his name in local headlines and hashtags. Since then, activists have pressured the city’s lawmakers to soften penalties for recreational marijuana, hoping decriminalization would lower unnecessarily violent encounters with police.
Today (April 25) Atlanta’s Public Safety Committee is meeting to discuss the ordinance, setting up another possible City Council vote in the coming weeks. But in a city where more than nine in 10 marijuana arrests are of Black people—among the highest rates in the country—marijuana’s criminality (or lack thereof) may not be enough to fix racist policing.
By now, we all know that Black and White Americans smoke pot at nearly identical rates, yet smokers of color are four times more likely to get arrested for it. We also know that each arrest brings jail time, fines and lifelong effects on employment and civil rights, contributing to a criminal justice system into which every fourth Black man will enter some point in his life.
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In the Democratic Republic of Congo, artisanal mining is a remnant of the once-booming gem industry. Slate: Diamonds Aren’t Forever
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As the truncated rat cooks in the fire, its body slowly roasting over the smoldering logs, 30-odd diggers stand around in the sweltering midday sun. Some break boulders at the bottom of a 50-foot pit in a dry riverbed, trying to access the gravel beneath, which they hope holds hidden wealth. Others watch, talk or take shelter from the heat.
A mile upstream, the divers try their luck. In ragged, re-stitched wetsuits, young men resurface every few minutes, heaving sacks of earth from the riverbed into the hands of helpers on a patchwork flotilla of multicolored dinghies. The boats are as close to the Angolan side of the river as can be, tethered to Congo by 50-foot ropes and pale hosepipes that pump air to the divers.
These miners are the remnants of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s diamond industry, which once provided a quarter of the world’s supply. In 2015, Congo exported 17.1 million carats of the gems, down from 33 million carats 10 years earlier. Across the country, as global diamond prices have dropped and other commodities like copper, cobalt, coltan, and gold have become more profitable, diamonds have been left to the diggers, divers, and dealers in forgotten corners of Congo trying to strike it rich, or at least eke out a living, in remote mines.
This mine is at the edge of the world as far as the local population is concerned. No car or truck has reached the village of Mawangu, perched on a bluff 500 feet above the diamond pits, since 2012.
A single airfreight company organizes a 90-minute flight from Congo’s chaotic capital, Kinshasa, a few times a month to Tembo, 30 miles further downstream on the River Kwango. From there, an hour on a motorbike along a narrow, sandy, single-track road, past a police roadblock, through dense forest and open savannah, and across a creaking, crumbling bridge, brings you to Mawangu. Everything comes in and out on two wheels or two feet.
The villages on the way have names but little else: Mkialangu, Vunda, Kakondo, Ngombwia-Tuba, Kasanzi. Yet the diggers and divers still come, drawn by the lure of the perfect stone.
Digger pans for diamonds in the River Kwango, Tembo.
Thomas Wilson
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STANDING on a muddy patch of grass in Mathare, a district in the eastern part of Nairobi, Kevin surveys his handiwork. From an electricity pylon, a thick bundle of crudely twisted wire hangs down into a tin-roofed shack. From there it spreads to a dozen more. Single wires run perilously at eye level over open sewers, powering bare light-bulbs, kettles and blaring speakers. In exchange for a connection, Kevin and six of his friends collect 200 shillings per month each (about $2) from about a hundred shacks in his corner of the slum. To protect the business, the gang pays off police officers and intimidates the competition. The connections, Kevin insists, are cheaper than official ones, and safer too. The rotting body of a fried rat near one of the lines suggests otherwise.
So goes the provision of public services in Nairobi’s poorest districts. These warrens of shacks and crudely built apartment blocks are home to 40% of the city’s population, according to one recent World Bank survey (others put the figure even higher). As the city’s population has exploded—from a third of a million at independence in 1963 to over 4m now—so too have the slums. Across Africa, they are the primary way by which hundreds of thousands of people have escaped even greater poverty in the countryside. By 2030, half of Africa’s population will live in cities, up from a third in 2010. According to the UN, two-thirds of that growth will take place in slums. Between 1990 and 2014, the continent’s slum population more than doubled, to some 200m people. Finding ways to improve slums will be one of the most pressing problems of the 21st century for African governments.
Slums grow because they provide something poor people need: affordable housing near to work, schools and public transport. Perversely, for such a poor continent, African cities tend to be sprawling and car-dependent. From Lusaka to Lagos, suburban housing estates and shopping malls, seemingly transplanted from Houston or Atlanta, are springing up at the edge of cities. But the vast majority of Africans cannot afford cars. In Nairobi slums are among the very few places close to jobs where it is possible to go shopping, watch a film and get a street-side meal, all without having to get into a vehicle.
The need to be near jobs helps explain why slums often sit next to staggering wealth. In Nairobi Mathare is wedged between Eastleigh, a bustling Somali commercial hub, and Muthaiga, a luxurious country club popular with white Kenyans. Alexandra in Johannesburg, a township of tin shacks, is at the edge of Sandton, the city’s poshest office district. In Lagos, a megacity where two-thirds of people live in slums, Makoko, a collection of shacks built on stilts in the lagoon, sits under the city’s Third Mainland Bridge, across from which new office buildings rent for vast sums
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.For over 40 years, the people of Western Sahara have endured war and occupation—yet few outside of northern Africa have ever heard of them or their suffering. In 1975, their vast territory—some 100,000 square miles of desert bordering the Atlantic—was invaded by Morocco. Almost half of the traditionally nomadic Sahrawi population was driven into remote refugee camps in neighboring Algeria, where 165,000 remain to this day. An entire generation has been born and raised in these camps.
Schoolgirls between the ages of ten and twelve in El Ayoun, a refugee camp in Algeria. According to the United Nations, one in four young children in the camps suffer from stunting caused by malnutrition. The girls wear t-shirts bearing the flag of the Sahrawi Republic.
Following Morocco’s occupation, the Sahrawis waged a long war of resistance. It ended in 1991, when Morocco agreed to allow the Sahrawis to vote on independence. But thanks to Moroccan obstruction, that referendum has never taken place. The United Nations has done almost nothing, and the United States and European Union—both of which railed against Russia’s intrusion into Ukraine—have refused to defend the Sahrawis.
I have visited the refugee camps as a diplomatic adviser to the Sahrawis, and have come away inspired by the vibrant and democratic society they have built. Their vitality and determination shine through in these remarkable images by Anthony Jean, who has documented life in the camps over the past six years. But there is also a mounting sense of despair among the refugees and, for some, a desire to return to armed struggle.
Morocco has sealed off the occupied territory with a towering sand wall that stretches for 1,700 miles across the desert, fortified by the world’s longest minefield. Journalists are rarely permitted inside; small wonder, given Morocco’s systematic abuse of human rights. Included here are rare photos of the Gdeim Izik protests in Western Sahara. In 2010, when thousands of Sahrawis demonstrated for their political freedom, Morocco responded by attacking them with helicopters and ground troops, using rubber bullets and water cannons to disperse the uprising. Seven years later, many of the protesters remain in Moroccan custody, subjected to unjust military trials and torture.
The true beginning of the Arab Spring, as Noam Chomsky has observed, took place in the camps of Gdeim Izik. And it is there, in Western Sahara, that the nations of the world must put an end to Morocco’s unlawful occupation, granting freedom and independence to Africa’s last colony.
Women in the Dakhla camp perform a traditional dance to celebrate the republic’s founding. The Sahrawis are a matriarchal society, descended from nomadic Berber tribes in which women handled household finances and ran local communities. Today women sit in the Sahrawi parliament, administer the refugee camps, and
train in the Sahrawi military.
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NOT everyone thinks birth control is a blessing. Boko Haram, a jihadist group that terrorises north-eastern Nigeria, deems artificial contraception to be a product of infidel learning, and therefore forbidden. Its ideologues also believe that females should avoid school, marry early (sometimes while still children) and have lots of babies. In the dwindling areas the jihadists control, women have no choice.
Even outside those areas, contraception is controversial. Boko Haram’s ideology didn’t spring from nowhere. Many Nigerian Muslims believe that pills and condoms are part of a Western plot to stop Muslims from multiplying. And in poor, rural areas, centuries of experience have taught people that having lots of children makes economic sense. They can be put to work in the fields, they will provide for their parents in old age and, given high rates of infant mortality, if you don’t have several you may end up with none.
So the government in Kaduna, a majority-Muslim state north of the capital, Abuja, does not encourage people to have fewer children. That would be politically toxic. But it does offer free contraception, and suggest that women might wish to pause between pregnancies. It also promotes girls’ education—something that has caused fertility rates to fall more or less everywhere it has been tried. As recently as 2008, women in Kaduna expected to have 6.3 babies each over a lifetime. By 2013 this had fallen to 4.1, well below the national average of 5.7 that year.
When Alheri Yusuf first heard about family planning from a relative, she hesitated. “I thought she didn’t want me to give my husband more children,” says the 33-year-old mother of four, as she waits for a contraceptive hormonal injection at a hospital in Kaduna. Then she realised that spacing her children would give her time to recover from childbirth.
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A landmark collection of black dolls showcases troubling stereotypes but also reveals how children have seen themselves reflected in the toys they played with. The Guardian: From controversy to empowerment: the history of black dolls.
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From the 1890s to the 1930s in Macon, Georgia, a black handyman named Leo Moss was a pioneer of black dolls. He painted doll faces black with chimney soot and had his wife design their clothes. Their papier-mache heads were made out of scrap pieces of wallpaper he collected on odd jobs he performed for white families. Every single doll was unique, created in the images of family and friends.
Now, the largest collection of rare Leo Moss dolls is in an exhibition at the Charles H Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. I See Me: Reflections in Black Dolls traces the history of black dolls, from porcelain to collectibles and plastic toys. Alongside the 16 Leo Moss dolls are 138 others, including antiques, black Barbie and even some celebrity dolls – created in the image of Serena Williams and the Obamas – which are on view until 25 June.
“The purpose really is to show how dolls empowered African Americans throughout history as a way to see yourself, to empower yourself,” said Jennifer Evans, the assistant curator at the Wright Museum. “Having so many dolls in one place, and for those growing up who couldn’t have a black doll, is very powerful.”
The chronological exhibition starts with a photo of a wooden paddle doll from ancient Egypt, which dates back to 2000 BC, and a Milliner’s model doll, from 1850. The dolls showcased are on loan from 25 collectors alongside the museum’s own collection, showing the evolution from African dolls to American dolls from the 19th and 20th century to the present day.
One rare doll is a “Frozen Charlotte”, a porcelain doll popular from 1850 to 1920 –black versions are very rare. “Fewer were made and few survived their original intent, whether it was for child’s play or mini mannequin use,” said Debbie Behan Garrett, a doll expert who wrote The Definitive Guide to Collecting Black Dolls. “I view these dolls as the Barbies of their time period, dolls designed to wear the fashions and hairstyles of the era.
Daddy long legs dolls: ‘Three Generations’. Photograph: On loan courtesy of Elizabeth Brooks
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