Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Fred McKinley Jones (1893-1961) is certainly one of the most important Black inventors ever based on the sheer number of inventions he formulated as well as their diversity.
Fred Jones was born on May 17, 1893 in Covington, Kentucky. His father was a white railroad worker of Irish descent and his mother was Black. It is believed that his mother died while he was young and Fred was raised by his father. When Fred was eight years old, his father took him to Cincinnati, Ohio to where they visited St. Mary's Catholic Church rectory. Fred's father urged Father Edward A. Ryan to take Fred in in order to expose him to an environment where he might have a better opportunity for gaining an education. Fred performed chores around the church in return for being fed and housed, cutting the grass, shoveling snow, scrubbing floors and learning to cook. At an early age, Fred demonstrated a great interest in mechanical working, whether taking apart a toy, a watch or a kitchen appliance. Eventually he became interested in automobiles, so much so that upon turning 12 years of age, he ran away from his home at the rectory and began working at the R.C. Crothers Garage.
Initially hired to sweep and clean the garage, Fred spent much of his time observing the mechanics as they worked on cars. His observation, along with a voracious appetite for learning through reading developed within Fred an incredible base of knowledge about automobiles and their inner workings. Within three years, Fred had become the foreman of the garage. The garage was primarily designed to repair automobiles brought in by customers but also served as a studio for building racing cars. After a few years of building these cars, Fred desired to drive them and soon became one of the most well known racers in the Great Lakes region. After brief stints working aboard a steamship and a hotel, Jones moved to Hallock, Minnesota began designing and building racecars which he drove them at local tracks and at county fairs. His favorite car was known as Number 15 and it was so well designed it not only defeated other automobile but once triumphed in a race against an airplane.
On August 1, 1918 Jones enlisted in the 809 Pioneer Infantry of the United States Army and served in France during World War I. While serving, Jones recruited German prisoners of war and rewired his camp for electricity, telephone and telegraph service. After being discharged by the Army, Fred returned to Hallock in 1919. Looking for work, Jones often aided local doctors by driving them around for housecalls during the winter season. When navigation through the snow proved difficult, Fred attached skis to the undercarriage of an old airplane body and attached an airplane propeller to a motor and soon whisked around town a high speeds in his new snowmachine. Over the next few years Fred began tinkering with almost everything he could find, inventing things he could not find and improving upon those he could. When one of the doctors he worked for on occasion complained that he wished he did not have to wait for patient to come into his office for x-ray exams, Jones created a portable x-ray machine that could be taken to the patient. Unfortunately, like many of his early inventions, Jones never thought to apply for a patent for machine and watched helplessly as other men made fortunes off of their versions of the device. Undaunted, Jones set out for other projects, including a radio transmitter, personal radio sets and eventually motion picture devices.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Noelle Singleton challenges any swim-cap maker who claims a swimmer’s hair won’t get wet with their caps to send her one. She’ll post a review on social media of her swimming a 100-meter individual medley in it.
Swim caps matter for Singleton, a 30-year-old black swim coach in Georgia with a thick, full-moon-shaped afro. Known on her AfroSwimmers Instagram account as Coach With the Fro, she has been offering swim lessons that target the black community for 16 years. The first question she always gets from female clients, she says, is: “What do I do with my hair?” She gives them tips, including which swim caps to buy. But, “I tell them up front: Please expect your hair to get wet,” Singleton says.
Historically, swimming pools have played a murky part in racial segregation and disparity in the United States. Despite a public-pool boom in the 1950s and ’60s, generations of black people have not learned how to swim. In 2017, a report from the USA Swimming Foundation found that 64.2 percent of black adults said they had no or low swimming abilities, versus 39.7 percent of white people. Among the black parents in that group, 78 percent said their children had no or low swimming abilities, too.
Numerous factors contribute to why blacks are less likely to swim: a lack of lap pools to learn in, a lack of representation in water sports, a fear of drowning, and a lack of affordable swim lessons. But one thing that’s often overlooked is that swim caps aren’t designed to protect common hairstyles among black women, adding yet another barrier to their participation in swimming, kayaking, water polo, diving, and other aquatic activities. “It’s an epidemic,” Singleton says of their exclusion.
For black women, hair is a long-standing point of pride, self-expression, status, and heritage. Some women will spend hundreds of dollars—and sit for hours—to get box braids or install a weave. That’s not including the hair products required for daily maintenance. All this makes swimming risky. Chlorine can damage the softness of an afro, the tightness of a box braid or sisterlock, or the clean scalp hidden under a sew-in weave. For some hairstyles, the prospect of starting over with washing, conditioning, sitting under a hair dryer, combing or picking out hair, and restyling in general is frustrating.
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Aretha Louise Franklin, the “Queen of Soul,” died in Detroit on Thursday surrounded by family and friends after a battle with pancreatic cancer, The Associated Press confirms. She was 76.
Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, to singer Barbara Franklin and the Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, who moved his family to Detroit to become the minister at New Bethel Baptist Church, according to Detroit Historical Museum.
In 1954, Franklin began singing solos at her father’s church and doing gospel recordings when she was 14, singing backup with her sisters for her dad’s music when he was signed to Gotham Records.
Franklin performing “There’s a Fountain Filled with Blood” at New Bethel when she was 14.
In 1960, Franklin, with her four-octave vocal range, moved to New York and signed with Columbia Records to pursue a career in secular music, and she had the support of her father. The following year, she released her first album with the label titled, Aretha: With the Ray Bryant Combo.
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White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders falsely claimed that President Donald Trump has created three times as many jobs for black workers as his predecessor Barack Obama did during his entire time in office.
Sanders asserted at a White House press briefing Tuesday that Trump had tripled Obama’s eight-year job creation record in just 18 months, quoting numbers that are not even close to accurate.
“This president since he took office, in the year and a half that he’s been here has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans,” Sanders told reporters Tuesday. “That’s 700,000 African-Americans that are working now that weren’t working when this president took place. When President Obama left, after eight years in office, he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans.”
The claim isn’t true, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the U.S. economy has added about 700,000 jobs held by black workers since Trump took office, it added about 3 million while Obama was in office, according to BLS data.
There were 15.5 million black workers with jobs when Obama took office in January 2009, as the country struggled to emerge from one of the worst economic recessions in decades. By the time Obama left office, 18.4 million black people had jobs. Trump inherited an economy on the upswing, and the rate of job growth has not changed significantly during his administration.
Two hours after Sanders made the claim, the White House Council of Economic Advisers posted in a tweet its “apologies” for a “miscommunication to” Sanders.
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If you take a quick glance across the magazine rack this month, expect to be greeted by an unprecedented wave of black cover stars. From Glamour to Vogue to Marie Claire, black women are currently providing a welcome respite from the lily-white stars that usually front a depressing 67 percent of fashion magazines. A brief list of the stars making covers this September—the fashion industry’s biggest issue of the year—include: singer, actress, and wine glass thief Rihanna on the cover of British Vogue, Beyoncé on American Vogue, Lupita Nyong’o on Porter, Tiffany Haddish on Glamour, Tracee Ellis Ross on Elle Canada, Zendaya on Marie Claire, supermodel Slick Woods on British Elle, Yara Shahidi on Hollywood Reporter, and Aja Naomi King on Shape.
In a year that, politically, has largely felt like a rebuke of not only blackness but any divergence from whiteness, the recognition of black women as both leaders in their respective fields and as cultural tastemakers is both welcome and long overdue. And yet there are some who are searching for an explanation of this sudden uptick, rather than simply celebrating it. One theory? According to the headline of a CNN.com piece, something called the “Wakanda Effect.”
Despite the fact that only one of the multitalented women in this roster was in any way involved with the Marvel box office smash Black Panther, crediting a Wakanda effect reduces these women’s careers and wide-ranging achievements to the impact of a single movie based on a 50-year-old comic. A tweet from the official CNN International account, which reads “The Wakanda Effect? Black women are dominating magazine covers this month” links to a story on the Month of Peak Blackness by CNN senior writer Lisa Respers France. What makes the tweet even more unfortunate is that the piece itself only passingly mentions Black Pantherbefore quickly segueing back into the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the covers:
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Brazil broke its own record for homicides last year, according to new figures which showed that 63,880 people were killed in 2017 – a 3% increase from the previous year.
Data from the independent Brazilian Public Security Forum said that an average of 14 people died at the hands of police officers every day – an increase of 20% from the previous year.
Rapes also rose 8% to 60,018, while murders of women increased 6.1% to 4,539.
“It is a devastating scenario,” said Renato Sérgio de Lima, director of the forum, who said the homicide figures had been exacerbated by antiquated laws and police procedures and the growth in organised crime. Most victims were young, black men from poor urban areas, he said.
“The numbers show we have a serious problem with lethal violence,” he said.
The chilling statistics are likely to play into October’s elections, in which crime is a key issue for many voters. The rightwing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro leads some polls on a platform that includes loosening gun controls and giving police more licence to kill.
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The LRA, a cultlike rebel group led by Joseph Kony, terrorized Uganda for two decades, killing 100,000 and displaced 1.7 million people. After 16 years as soldiers in a brutal organization, a bond of friendship helped them find their way home. Washington Post: Kidnapped as children, they escaped from Kony’s LRA to be reunited with their families in Uganda
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Kidnapped when he was just 16 to fight for the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army, Stephen Okot found his way to freedom and back to his family years later through a rare friendship made in the bush.
Trained to kill and always fearing informers and punishment by his own comrades, Okot had long kept to himself, until by chance he started talking with Oryem Bosco, a short, shy man a few years younger, about their childhoods in northern Uganda. “I told him my ancestral place only to realize we came from the same district,” Okot said.
From that day, Okot and Bosco began sharing food. As they ate, they huddled together, contemplating the decade they had been away from their families, whispering about what they saw around them — the killing without mercy, the lack of education among the fighters, the bleakness of their future.
The LRA, a cultlike rebel group led by Joseph Kony, terrorized northern Uganda for almost two decades, killing 100,000 and displacing 1.7 million with the stated intention of imposing a rule based on the Ten Commandments.
Its fighters kidnapped tens of thousands of children, turning them into killers who carried out rapes, torture and massacres, before the group was driven out of the country in 2006.
Last year, the United States ended its seven-year support for the hunt to find Kony, pulling funding that encouraged LRA defections through leaflets, loudspeakers and local radio broadcasts.
Paul Ronan, from the nonprofit Invisible Children, warns that the group remains a threat.
With several hundred scattered throughout Congo and the Central African Republic, LRA fighters have kidnapped more than 160 civilians this year, according to Invisible Children’s LRA Crisis Tracker.
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The National Army Museum has quietly removed from display a 19th-century looted braid of hair which the Ethiopian government has requested back as a national treasure.
It came from the head of the Emperor Tewodros II, who killed himself at the end of the British invasion of Ethiopia in 1868 rather than being taken prisoner. He shot himself with a pistol that had been a gift from Queen Victoria.
His clothes were torn from him and the braid was cut off and taken to the UK, along with hundreds of objects pillaged by an expeditionary force under the command of Lt Gen Sir Robert Napier.
It was a military expedition to save British hostages, including the British consul, Charles Cameron, who had been kept in chains for more than two years.
The army destroyed the emperor’s Maqdala mountain fortress in northern Ethiopia. It brought back treasures, transported on 15 elephants and 200 mules, that were eventually deposited in various British institutions.
For years, the braid has been held at the National Army Museum in Chelsea. It was removed from view following a visit in April by the Ethiopian ambassador, who made an official call for its return. Ethiopia wants the braid to be interred with the rest of the emperor’s remains at his final resting place at the monastery of the Holy Trinity at Quara.
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