COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Herman Russell Branson (August 14, 1914 – June 7, 1995) was an African American physicist, best known for his research on the alpha helix protein structure. He was also the president of two colleges.
Branson received his B.S. from Virginia State College in 1936, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cincinnati, under the direction of Boris Padowski, in 1939. After a stint at Dillard University, he joined Howard University in 1941 as an assistant professor of physics and chemistry. He remained at Howard for 27 years, achieving increasingly important positions, eventually becoming head of the physics department, director of a program in experimental science and mathematics, and working on the Office of Naval Research and Atomic Energy Commission Projects in Physics at Howard University.
In 1948, Branson took a leave and spent time at the California Institute of Technology, in the laboratory of the chemist Linus Pauling. There he was assigned work on the structure of proteins, specifically to use his mathematical abilities to determine possible helical structures that would fit both the available x-ray crystallography data and a set of chemical restrictions outlined by Pauling. After some months of work, Branson handed in a report narrowing the possible structures to two helixes, a tighter coil Pauling termed "alpha," and a looser helix called "gamma." Branson then returned to Howard to work on other projects.
Branson went on to a significant career, eventually serving as president of Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, from 1968–1970, and then president of Lincoln University until his retirement in 1985. He was active in increasing federal funding for higher education, and helped found the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education in 1969.[3]
In 1984 Branson wrote Pauling biographers Victor and Mildred Goertzel implying that his contribution to the alpha helix had been greater than the final paper indicated. “I took my work to Pauling who told me that he thought they [the proposed alpha and gamma helixes] were too tight, that he thought that a protein molecule should have a much larger radius so that water molecules could fit down inside and cause the protein to swell,” he wrote. “I went back and worked unsuccessfully to find such a structure.” When he received Pauling’s note with the draft manuscript, Branson wrote, “I interpreted this letter as establishing that the alpha and gamma in my paper were correct and that the subsequent work done was cleaning up or verifying. The differences were nil.
Branson was co-inventor of the alpha helix and perhaps deserved a share of the Nobel prize. As the story goes somehow Linus Pauling got Branson excluded from the prize [New Yorker mag]....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Groundbreaking elections in the late 1860s gave birth to A real, if short-lived, interracial democracy, the likes of which America had before never seen. The Atlantic: When the South Was the Most Progressive Region in America
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One hundred and fifty years ago, on January 14, 1868, an extraordinary convention opened in Charleston, South Carolina, the cradle of the Confederacy.
That afternoon, a biracial group of men—most of whom were black and some of whom had recently been enslaved—gathered at the elegant Charleston Club House, which had only recently been the refuge of city elite. They came to redraft South Carolina’s uniquely undemocratic constitution. One of nearly a dozen interracial meetings held in the former Confederacy between late 1867 and 1869, the South Carolina Constitutional Convention was part of a larger Reconstruction-era campaign to rebuild the nation in a more just fashion.
Today, the South is primarily associated with hidebound conservatism. But for a few brief years after the Civil War, this campaign transformed the region into the most progressive place in America—providing a blueprint for a liberal resurgence that may already be under way in the 21st century South.
The antebellum South had long been a conservative bastion, characterized by its dogged commitment to states’ rights, low taxes, strict construction of the Constitution, and especially the maintenance of traditional gender roles and white supremacy. Fearful that Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election threatened slavery, white South Carolinians in late 1860 had gathered just a few blocks from the Charleston Club House to secede from the United States, sparking four bloody years of civil war.
Less than a decade later, however, former slaves and freeborn blacks helped choose delegates to state constitutional conventions across the South, including the one in Charleston. These groundbreaking 1867 and 1868 elections, which followed a congressional mandate, gave birth to real, if short-lived, interracial democracy. African Americans occupied one-quarter of the seats in the conventions as a whole and a majority of them in Louisiana and South Carolina.
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In light of President Donald Trump’s recent “shithole” remarks, followed by a flood of exceptional-immigrant stories on social media to refute them, followed by commentary that said immigrants have nothing to prove, it should be noted that the facts actually bear out that that this nation would be much better off with more black Africans, who are some of the most educated people in the country and who contribute billions to the economy.
In fact, on average, African immigrants are better educated than the immigrant population as a whole and people born here in these United States.
Oh, and for those who think that this doesn’t refer to “black” or sub-Saharan Africa, that would be an incorrect assumption.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
[R]esearch found that of the 1.4 million [sub-Saharan African immigrants] who are 25 and older, 41% have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30% of all immigrants and 32% of the U.S.-born population. Of the 19,000 U.S. immigrants from Norway — a country Trump reportedly told lawmakers is a good source of immigrants — 38% have college educations.
According to a report released last year, “How Sub-Saharan Africans Contribute to the U.S. Economy” (pdf), African immigrants were also significantly more likely to have graduate degrees, with 16 percent having a master’s degree, medical degree, law degree or doctorate, compared with 11 percent of the U.S.-born population.
According to the Times, although the number of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa is pretty small (about 1.7 million overall), the numbers have risen in recent years. Most African immigrants come from the following countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa, notably all nations where English is the primary language except for Ethiopia, where it is the most widely spoken foreign language.
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Some African countries are in a foul state — and it’s because they’re governed by men like Donald Trump. American Sh*thole
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US. President Donald Trump’s reported comments maligning the people of African nations were a foreseeable outburst from a man addicted to the cable news culture that consistently portrays the continent in a negative light. They were also, ironically, an indictment of his own leadership style.
What the president doesn’t grasp is that if some African nations have been reduced to “shithole countries,” it’s precisely because they’ve been run by leaders like Trump. Indeed, underdevelopment in sub-Saharan Africa — and the institutional disorders that propel migrants toward countries like the United States — can be traced directly to leaders who behave as he does.
Trump provides ample evidence that executive rot is borderless. In his first year in power, he attacked members of the federal judiciary, purged career civil servants perceived to be disloyal, and appointed unqualified members of his family and social circle to key strategic roles. USA Today detailed how dozens of lobbyists and executives with federal contracts pay large sums to play golf at Trump’s private clubs, often when he is there. He has terrorized media and political opponents. He has used his pardon power to undermine constitutional rights. His Cabinet spent months piggishly using their official positions to travel like a moneyed executive class — from which, incidentally, many came.
These moves are familiar to anyone living in the aforementioned “shitholes.” Trump wastes taxpayer money like the best of African dictatorial leadership. In his years as head of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko spent $400 million on Gbadolite, a palatial spread in the heart of rural Nord-Ubangi province — complete with a landing strip for the Concorde — where he hosted monarchs, foreign heads of state, and, reportedly, Pope John Paul II. Similarly, Trump vaporized $10 million of taxpayer money on his first three gratuitous trips to Mar-a-Lago. The Washington Post estimates Trump’s four-year run rate at $130 million.
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The Trump administration has slapped Haiti again.
As of Thursday, Haitian farmers and other laborers seeking to come to the United States as temporary, seasonal workers under the federal H-2A and H-2B guest worker program, will no longer be eligible.
The temporary workers’ visa has for decades allowed hundreds of U.S. farmers, hoteliers and other business owners to hire thousands of foreign seasonal workers.
But citing Haitians’ “extremely high rates of refusal... high levels of fraud and abuse and a high rate of overstaying the terms of their H-2 admission,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Haiti’s inclusion on the lists of eligible countries for 2018 “is no longer in the U.S. interest.” It also announced that the English-speaking Central American country of Belize will be banned, as well as Samoa in the central South Pacific Ocean.
“Eliminating this visa eliminates the only lawful channel some Haitians have to come temporarily work in the United States,” said Michael Clemens, an economist with the Center for Global Development, who has studied Haiti-U.S. labor migration since 2010. “That is not the way to address illegal migration. That is a way to encourage illegal migration.”
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