COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Henry Ransom Cecil McBay (1914–1995) was an African - American chemist and a teacher.
McBay was born "Henry Ransom McBay" (named from his maternal grandfather, Henry Ransom) in 1914 in Mexia, Texas. His father, William Cecil McBay, was a barber who eventually became an embalmer and funeral director; his mother, Roberta Ransom (McBay), was a seamstress.
McBay was able to receive a good education because of his proficiency in math. He was able to gain admission to Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and paid for his education by working in the college’s dining-hall and post office. Inspired by his math and chemistry professors, McBay studied organic chemistry and earned his B.S. degree in 1934. His Wiley professors helped him acquire a scholarship to Atlanta to work on his next degree.
With only $1.65 in his pocket, McBay immediately took a job in the Atlanta University dining hall so he could eat. After only a few days on campus, his faculty advisor, Professor K. A. Huggins, arranged for him to work in the chemistry laboratory.
McBay began to help Huggins study new types of plastics that had properties similar to natural rubber. Soon, McBay was performing his own analysis of the plastics. When the project was finished, he received his master’s degree from Atlanta University and Huggins received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. This indirect connection to the University of Chicago would later be important to his career.
After earning his master’s degree, he returned to Wiley College so he could help his younger brother and sister pay for college. However, going “home” proved to be a disappointment. Some faculty members still thought of him as their student and never accepted McBay as an academic peer. Because of his devotion to his siblings, however, he remained at Wiley until his brother received his college degree and his parents were able to pay for his sister’s education.
In 1938 McBay took a better-paying teaching job at a Quindaro, Kansas junior college. At the end of the first year, he enrolled in the University of Chicago summer school program, where he received good grades for that term. When he returned to Quindaro, he found that the new junior college principal had, for political reasons, hired an instructor in his place.
McBay then moved to a high school mathematics teaching position in Huntsville, Texas, where he stayed for three semesters. He then joined a newly formed research team at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama assigned the task of finding a suitable substitute for jute fiber. Indian shipments of jute, which was used for rope and fabrics for sacks, had ended due to World War I.
The Tuskegee team hoped to prove that okra stems would be an effective substitute, but McBay proved that by the time an okra plant had matured, the stems were too brittle. Okra could be harvested for food or for fiber, but not for both. Ironically, McBay had worked himself out of a job.......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Breitbart News landed an election scoop that went viral in August 2016: “Exclusive: ‘Black Men for Bernie’ Founder to End Democrat ‘Political Slavery’ of Minority Voters… by Campaigning for Trump.”
If the splashy, counterintuitive story, which circulated on such conservative websites as Truthfeed and Infowars, wasn't exactly fake news, it was carefully orchestrated.
The story’s writer—an employee of the conservative website run by Steve Bannon before he took over Donald Trump’s campaign—spent weeks courting activist Bruce Carter to join Trump’s cause. He approached Carter under the guise of interviewing him. The writer eventually dropped the pretense altogether, signing Carter up for a 10-week blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul, or simply sit out the election. Trump’s narrow path to victory tightened further if Hillary Clinton could attract a Barack Obama-level turnout.
Bannon’s deployment of the psychological-operations firm Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 campaign drew fresh attention this month, when a former Cambridge employee told a U.S. Senate panel that Bannon tried to use the company to suppress the black vote in key states. Carter’s story shows for the first time how an employee at Bannon’s former news site worked as an off-the-books political operative in the service of a similar goal.
Carter’s recollections and correspondence, which he shared after a falling-out with his fellow Trump supporters, provide a rare look inside the no-holds-barred nature of the Republican’s campaign and how it explored new ways to achieve an age-old political aim: getting the right voters to the polls—and keeping the wrong ones away.
“If you can’t stomach Trump, just don’t vote for the other people and don’t vote at all,” Carter, 47, recalls telling black voters. It’s the message he says the Trump campaign wanted him to deliver. “That’s what they wanted, that’s what they got.”
The work Carter says he did, and the funds he was given to do it, also raise questions as to whether campaign finance laws were broken.
The group Carter founded, Trump for Urban Communities, never disclosed its spending to the Federal Election Commission—a possible violation of election law. In hindsight, Carter says, he believed he was working for the campaign so he wouldn’t have been responsible for reporting the spending.
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Can divesting from America’s big financial institutions help fix racial inequality? The New Republic: Banking Black
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For generations, black-owned banks were—and in some cases still are—the only option for African Americans in need of mortgages and business loans. They were the chief lenders to churches, small businesses, and community organizations in the black community. On the day before he was assassinated in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a “bank-in” movement. “We’ve got to strengthen black institutions,” King told a crowd at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. He urged black people to withdraw their money from the “banks downtown” and put it in the black-owned Tri-State Bank, which is still open today, and which has long participated in black voter-registration campaigns and efforts to integrate public schools. By investing in black banks, King said, “we begin the process of building a greater economic base and at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts.”
Wells Fargo, the second-largest home mortgage originator in the country, has made headlines for its discriminatory acts against black home buyers. According to a 2012 lawsuit, the bank pushed black people toward more expensive mortgages and charged them higher fees and rates than white borrowers with similar credit profiles. (The bank ultimately settled with the Department of Justice for $175 million.) Bank of America has also been fined, as recently as March 2018, for racial discrimination in its hiring and lending practices. According to Reveal, the publication of the Center for Investigative Reporting, discrimination continues at the local level against African Americans applying for mortgages. Community banks run by white people give less than 1 percent of their mortgages to African Americans.
Even today, 50 years after King called for a bank-in movement, the rate of black homeownership, usually a family’s largest asset, has remained virtually unchanged, at 40 percent, 30 points lower than the rate of white homeownership. The mainstream banking system is, at least in part, responsible for these continued inequities, said Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.
By contrast, more than two-thirds of mortgage loans given out by black-owned banks in 2011 went to black borrowers, according to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study. United Bank of Philadelphia has said it has created and maintained more than 1,500 jobs since it expanded its small business loan services in 2013. Harbor Bank of Maryland is working to support local black entrepreneurs and black-owned startups. And for each dollar deposited in Carver Bank, 83 cents is reinvested in the community, according to bank reports.
This is important work. But the revival of the bank black movement can’t in isolation undo generations of structural racism and economic inequality. John Robinson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the intersection of race and banking, pointed me to another example from the civil rights era: the Montgomery bus boycott. It was effective, Robinson said, because it was part of a larger political strategy, in Alabama and around the country. Boycotters organized an alternative transport system of carpools, car insurance policies, discounted taxi rides, new shoes for walkers, all of which helped to sustain the campaign and bring it national attention. Politicians were forced to respond. The boycott was about more than just taking your money and moving it elsewhere; it was about political change.
What Montgomery illustrated was that any movement that wants to address economic inequality in this country must have a financial agenda and a political one. The #BankBlack movement is predominantly about economic empowerment and pressure, not politics. That alone cannot change a system that has, for decades, perpetuated racial inequality in the United States. To do that, the movement would have to be linked to a comprehensive political program that might include federal and state job programs for people of color, the end of cash bail, and reparations, as the Movement for Black Lives called for in its 2016 platform, released almost two years to the day after Michael Brown’s death.
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There was already lots of speculation that NFL team owners were particularly susceptible to criticism from President Donald Trump about players who kneeled during the national anthem. Now sworn depositions are showing that Trump’s words had a direct impact on the way the NFL decided to change its rules on what players are allowed to do during the National Anthem. The Wall Street Journal obtained sworn depositions from NFL owners related to the grievance filed against the league by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kapernick, who claims he was blackballed over the anthem protests.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said that the president personally told him, “You can’t win this one.” The president said that the anthem controversy “is a very winning, strong issue for me.” And it isn’t as if Trump wanted his views on the issue to be kept secret: “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one,” the president allegedly said. “This one lifts me.”
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While beauty competitions in America still primarily have women prancing around in a bathing suits and showing off their, “talents” in exchange for scholarship money and a crown, a Rwandan based contest is focusing all of its attention on women’s brains.
The Ms. Geek Africa competition is centered on highlighting the talent young women have to offer to the tech world, instead of focusing on their looks.
Starting in 2014, the competition includes women between ages 13 to 25 who compete to win financial support to bring their technological ideas to fruition. They have to find creative ways to use problem solving skills and technology to advance their communities. The competition includes young women who represent a number of African nations.
Salissou Hassane Latifa, won this year’s Ms. Geek Africa by developing an app that facilitates communication between medical personnel and people at an accident scene, thus helping to directly offer first aid during an emergency.
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Will Ethiopia become “the China of Africa”? The question often comes up in an economic context: Ethiopia’s growth rate is expected to be 8.5 percent this year, topping China’s projected 6.5 percent. Over the past decade, Ethiopia has averaged about 10 percent growth. Behind those flashy numbers, however, is an undervalued common feature: Both countries feel secure about their pasts and have a definite vision for their futures. Both countries believe that they are destined to be great.
Consider China first. The nation-state, as we know it today, has existed for several thousand years with some form of basic continuity. Most Chinese identify with the historical kingdoms and dynasties they study in school, and the tomb of Confucius in Qufu is a leading tourist attraction. Visitors go there to pay homage to a founder of the China they know.
This early history meant China was well-positioned to quickly build a modern and effective nation-state, once the introduction of post-Mao reforms boosted gross domestic product. That led to rapid gains in infrastructure and education, and paved the way for China to become one of the world’s two biggest economies. Along the way, the Chinese held to a strong vision that it deserved to be a great nation once again.
My visit to Ethiopia keeps reminding me of this basic picture. Ethiopia also had a relatively mature nation-state quite early, with the Aksumite Kingdom dating from the first century A.D. Subsequent regimes, through medieval times and beyond, exercised a fair amount of power. Most important, today’s Ethiopians see their country as a direct extension of these earlier political units. Some influential Ethiopians will claim to trace their lineage all the way to King Solomon of biblical times.
In other words, the process of organized, national-level governance has been underway for a long time. It was this relative strength of Ethiopian governance that allowed the territory to fend off colonialism, a rare achievement. It is also why, when you travel around the country, a lot of the basic cuisine doesn’t change much: Dishes are seen as national and not regional.
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What explains this situation, says Guillermo Etkin, coordinator of the Superintendence of Social and Economic Studies of Bahia (SEI-BA), “are basically two aspects: schooling and [early] placing in the labor market, since blacks begin to work sooner, which affects schooling.”
Dona Geni is an example of this. Not only did she begin to toil while still a child, as during a good part of her adult life she managed an incomplete basic education — until 34 years of age she had only studied up to 4th grade.
In 2016, blacks occupied 45.2% of the vacancies for basic education, 44.7% of those that required a high school education, albeit incomplete, but only 27% of jobs requiring higher education in Brazil.
“The população negra (black population) has the worst social indicators, the lowest levels of schooling, income and access to goods and services, as well as the highest indices of early mortality, when compared with the white population. These data of the MTE point to one of the faces of social inequality in Brazil: the racial division of highly resilient labor”, says the researcher Antônio Teixeira, coordinator of gender, ethnicity and generational studies of the Ipea.
Leila Gonzaga, researcher of the Fundação SEADE (Educational System of Data Analysis), reinforces that the abyss in the labor market goes beyond the low access to classrooms. “The discussion of inequality begins with our history. Outside of this, there’s the ascension in the career and the question of prejudice. The ascension of blacks is very different from the non-black in a company,” she says.
The MTE data also show this. Working environments in which subordinates are black come with a majority of whites occupying management positions. If 60% of work servants are black, 52% of the overseers of the work are white. While three quarters of telemarketing operators are black, 53% of supervisors are white.
The inequality between whites and blacks persists throughout Brazil, but can be perceived in different ways, the experts point out.
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The Caribbean island of Barbados has elected its first woman prime minister since gaining independence from Britain in 1966. BBC: Barbados elects Mia Mottley as first woman PM
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Ms Mottley faced a barrage of personal and political attacks from the DLP during the election campaign, but also picked up an apparent endorsement from Barbadian pop star Rihanna.
Speaking shortly after it became apparent that the BLP would form the next government, Ms Mottley told cheering supporters: "This is not my victory. This is not the Labour Party's victory. This is the people of Barbados's victory,"
Mr Stuart, her defeated opponent, said he "unhesitatingly and unequivocally and frankly" accepted responsibility for the DLP's wipeout.
He added that the election "demonstrates that Barbados's democracy is alive and well".
Ms Mottley's new administration - like its predecessor, a broadly centre-left government - faces a host of problems in a country once seen as a byword for good governance in the Caribbean.
Despite the island's enduring popularity with tourists from Western Europe and North America, and growing arrivals from newer tourist markets like China and Russia, the Barbadian economy has failed to shrug off the effects of the global economic crisis of the late 2000s.
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“911, what’s the address of your emergency?” I said into the headset.
The man gave me his address and then said, “There’s a woman pushing a shopping cart in front of my house.”
This one stumped me. I worked in a large metropolitan area. Yes, the city where I worked was affluent, and most people used their cars to get groceries. But surely he’d seen a person using a personal grocery cart before.
“I’m sorry, I’m not getting it. What’s the problem?” I waited for more clarification as I racked my brain for the correct penal code under which this infraction might fall.
“You need to get out here now.”
“Um.” A dispatcher has to be cautious about how she phrases things. Of all the jobs in emergency services — firefighters, police officers, nurses, doctors — dispatchers are the only ones who are recorded during every single thing they do. Everything they say — and their whole job is speaking — is part of public record. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re reporting.”
“She’s black.”
My heart sped up as it did every day when I heard this kind of thing. This Northern California city was affluent and very white, bordering Oakland, much of which was neither. “Sir, I’m still not seeing the problem. Is she being loud? Is the noise of the cart disturbing your peace?”
His tone got harsher. “Where do you live?”
I was so startled by the question that I answered it. “Oakland,” I said.
“You wouldn’t understand, then. This isn’t Oakland. We don’t have people like her in this neighborhood. Just send someone out to get rid of her. I’m not talking to you anymore.” The click in my ear was his goodbye.
The worst thing about it? I had to send someone out. Dispatchers usually don’t get to choose which calls lead to the dispatching of emergency personnel and which don’t.
If a person wants to make a report, they get to make a report. You can think of police reports as being like lawsuits. Anyone can make one about anything, no matter how stupid. Shortly after 9/11, I had to send an officer to take a report from a citizen because she’d had a dream about a knife-wielding man from Afghanistan.
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