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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Last December, at the election-night watch party for Doug Jones in Birmingham, Alabama, LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright were among the last to arrive. The founders of the Black Voters Matter Fund had worked throughout 2017 to register and turn out rural voters in the state for the former U.S. attorney’s long-shot U.S. Senate bid against evangelical stalwart and accused child molester Roy Moore. They had moved souls to the polls until they closed, then met up in Birmingham to join their fellow activists and Democrats.
“The people in there were quiet, hushed, waiting for the final results,” Brown told me. “These being Alabama Democrats, nobody could actually believe their own eyes, believe that we were actually winning. It was still close when we got there. Then we saw on CNN that two counties were left, Hale and Dallas. People were biting their nails. But our group started celebrating, whooping it up. And an older white woman, wouldn’t you know, came over and told us to be quiet. She said, ‘No, hush, don’t celebrate, don’t jinx it!’ Well, we had literally just left Hale and Dallas counties. We said, ‘No, ma’am, we know what happened: We won.’ And of course, we did.”
What the lady didn’t know–what almost nobody realized—was how this seeming miracle, the biggest Democratic victory in Alabama since what felt like the Dawn of Time, had come about. The multiple allegations against Moore hadn’t tipped the election decisively in Jones’s favor; white Alabamians, including two-thirds of white women, had stuck with the Trump-endorsed Republican, who’d twice been booted from his job as state Supreme Court chief justice, most recently for defying federal law on same-sex marriage. But voters in predominantly black counties had shown up in numbers never before seen in non-presidential years. Black women—98 percent went for Jones—had made the ultimate difference.
The news was heartening but mystifying to Democrats outside the South, many of whom have long tended to view Alabama—like the rest of the South—as one big, unbroken expanse of incorrigible white racists, both a source and a symbol of everything ugly and backward about America. For decades, this stereotype dictated Democrats’ approach to the South. You couldn’t win statewide down there, the consultants said, without running white moderates adept at speaking the language of white conservatism.
To garner party support for a run in the South, Democrats distanced themselves from liberal ideas and black voters. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter was Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992, in which he famously lambasted an “anti-white” rapper in an attempt to reinforce his appeal to conservative whites. This came not long after he’d made a show of returning to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled black man. Democrats could only win below the Mason-Dixon, the thinking went, by pandering to white “swing” voters.
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A new survey from The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute finds that the past two years have eroded African American participation in politics and activism, even in a watershed election year for minorities. The Atlantic: The Trump Era Is Destroying Black Civics, but Delivering Black Votes
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The 2018 elections will mark one of the most consequential civic moments for black voters and candidates in modern times. No black governors currently hold office, but this fall could bring as many as three into power, and also promises a slate of black candidates rivaling that of any election year since Reconstruction. Black voters showed up in 2008 and 2012 in historic levels during Barack Obama’s two elections, but 2018 and 2020 will be new tests for black turnout—and for how far an anti–Donald Trump movement can go.
But with so much history potentially on the horizon, there are storm clouds, as well. The American public’s faith in civic and democratic institutions has plummeted in recent years, and many theorists have named isolation, the collapse of communities, and the degradation of civics as key factors in Trump’s rise. While minority and women candidates are having a banner year, restrictions to the ballot in black and Latino communities have intensified. And, as a new poll conducted in August and September by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic finds, black political and civic participation has been especially damaged in the past two years. As the 2018 elections loom, that damage will be a critical factor in determining just how far black votes will carry.
But the new poll from PRRI and The Atlantic, conducted with more than 1,800 Americans and focused on their past and current experiences with civics, suggests that the effects have been powerful and highly distortive in black communities especially. “African Americans are less likely to say over the last two years they’ve become more civically engaged,” says Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI. “They’re less likely to say they’ve considered running for office, and less likely than whites to say they’re likely to consider a career in government.” Thirty-seven percent of black people and 34 percent of Hispanic people report that over the past two years they’ve become less active in civics or politics, as opposed to 28 percent of whites. Fifty-seven percent of black respondents said that over the past two years they’ve been less likely to run for office.
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“IT’S going to be crazy tonight,” sighs Craven Engel, a pastor in Hanover Park, a township on the fringes of Cape Town. A few hours earlier gunmen had killed a high-ranking member of the Laughing Boys, a gang. Mr Engel is on his phone, trying to dissuade its leaders from vengeance, which is just hours away. “Everyone has a violent vibe going on.”
Since the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa as a whole has had less of a violent vibe. The murder rate—the best indicator of violent crime, as most cases are reported—has fallen by almost half, from 69 per 100,000 people in 1994/95 to 36 in 2017/18. International data are patchy, but they suggest that since the end of apartheid South Africa went from being the world’s third-most-murderous country to the seventh. Nevertheless, its murder rate has recently ticked up, from a low of 30 per 100,000 in 2011/12. The jump last year was the biggest since 1994.
Cape Town’s murder rate has risen from 43 to 69 per 100,000 between 2009/10 and 2017/18, calculates Anine Kriegler of the University of Cape Town. Last year’s rise was the biggest since comparable data became available in 2005/06. Today its rate is more than twice that of Johannesburg (see chart) and higher than in any large city outside the Americas, according to the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think-tank.
That may surprise those who associate Cape Town with beaches and Table Mountain. But a short drive from some of the priciest property in Africa are the Cape Flats, a patchwork of townships. Many were dumping grounds when the apartheid regime removed “Coloureds” (people of mixed race) from the inner city in the 1960s. Unemployment and poverty are endemic. Most children grow up fatherless. In one precinct, Philippi East, 93% of households were victims of crime in 2016.
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At the end of a dusty road in the southern African hinterland sits a small concrete building with an orange door. It is a structure so modest and remote that it is hard to believe it could hold lessons for addressing one of the world’s biggest challenges.
The unit is the medical hub for Gasita, a village of 2,000 people in the south of Botswana. Inside one of the rooms, pharmaceutical supplies are neatly stashed on shelves while a photograph of the country’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, is propped up on a counter next to a window that is ajar, letting in a warm breeze.
Outposts like these – offering family planning services, contraception, education – have helped bring about one of the world’s most remarkable demographic shifts. In a continent where fertility rates are the highest in the world and populations are soaring, Botswana has a different story to tell.
Fifty years ago, Botswanan women would have seven children on average. Now they have fewer than three. It’s one of the fastest falling fertility rates anywhere in the world – a dramatic decline that merits scrutiny.
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Scott Dowell, an infectious disease doctor, has helped respond to more than a dozen Ebola outbreaks in the last two decades. But the one that’s currently ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo is different from all the others he’s seen: For the first time in history, Ebola is spreading in an active war zone.
Just before his arrival in September, two large attacks in and outside Beni — where Dowell, the deputy director for surveillance and epidemiology at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was working — killed more than 30 people, bringing the total number of civilian deaths in DRC this year to 235.
“The population is going about their daily business,” Dowell said. “But then we’d have these episodes where it really is dangerous. There were a couple of nights we heard shooting and saw people running down the street in front of the place we were staying.”
The Ebola outbreak happening amid this havoc was declared on August 1, a week after another Ebola flareup in Western DRC ended. Since then, nearly 200 people have gotten sick with the virus, including 122 deaths — making it one of the largest Ebola outbreaks in history.
It’s also proving to be one of the most challenging to control. The virus is spreading in North Kivu and Ituri, provinces in Eastern DRC on the border of Rwanda and Uganda. There, armed opposition groups have been carrying out deadly attacks on civilians, which are forcing people from their homes. More than a million people are displaced in the area, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
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Since 2006, the Gardasil vaccine has been used by 9 to 26 year olds to stop the spread of the human papilloma virus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection (STI) that can cause genital warts and various types of cancer. Last Friday (October 5), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) concluded that the current version of the drug can be used up to the age of 45. This increase could be be particularly beneficial for Black and Latinx people, who develop HPV-related cancer at higher rates than other races.
About half of teens in the United States have taken two or three doses of Gardasil, reports The Associated Press. Merck, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures it, concluded after a study that the vaccine also works for older adults. Those under 16 must take two doses for it to be effective, while anyone older should take three, spaced a few months apart. It is about 90 percent effective for women three years after the third dose.
Other than an increase in the permitted age, the newest version of Gardasil 9 protects against nine strains of HPV, while the original only guarded against four.
“Today’s approval represents an important opportunity to help prevent HPV-related diseases and cancers in a broader age range,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.
HPV is the most commonly transmitted STI in the United States. It is transmitted through oral, vaginal and anal sex. About 14 million people are newly infected with HPV each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Additionally, “each year about 33,700 women and men are diagnosed with a cancer caused by an HPV infection,” reports The AP.
The CDC found that a disproportionate number of Black and Latinx people with the STI develop certain types of cancers. More Black women get HPV-associated vaginal cancer than women of other races. Black and Latinx men have higher rates of HPV-associated penile cancer than White, non-Latinx men. Incidences of anal and rectal cancers that are HPV-related are higher in Black men than their White counterparts.
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Today, sneaker culture seems almost tame. Suburban dads like Andre Johnson on ABC’s Black-ish have tennis shoe collections, as did sneaker lover Turtle, the least-threatening member of the crew on HBO’s Entourage. But in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the press increasingly linked sneakers and streetwear to youth violence.
Black teens in particular were the focus of news reports about robberies and murders related to expensive sportswear. Although these incidents were far from the norm, they were used to paint African-American youth as immoral and materialistic. They even influenced school officials to crack down on student dress.
Footwear like Air Jordans was described as the attire of gang members and drug dealers, leading to bans in some schools. Today, school dress codes across the country still include passages about gang attire, though the policies rarely define what such clothing is.
The historic outcry about trendy sportswear and the continued bans on gang apparel are a statement on how society views African Americans and, by extension, the clothing linked to them. Just as youth of color have been disproportionately criminalized in schools, so has the style of clothing many of them enjoy.
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