COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Coming from a long line of relatives that worked in the medical and science fields, Jewell Plummer Cobb dedicated her life first to the research of cellular biology and then to the teaching of science to people of minority status. As the president of California State University-Fullerton, Cobb made advances in the opportunities to motivate minority students of all ages to study science and engineering and has been honored due to her work by numerous colleges as well as by the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C.
Jewell Plummer Cobb was born on January 17, 1924, in Chicago, Illinois. She was the only child of Frank V. Plummer, a middle-class doctor, and Carriebel Cole Plummer, a dance instructor who worked closely with the Works Projects Administration in the 1930s. Cobb’s father was one of the main inspirations in the young girl’s life, making it clear to her that the most important thing in life was making life better for those around you. Frank Plummer lived by this rule, setting up his first office on the corner where a streetcar had a transfer point for commuting stockyard workers. This allowed the workers, almost all of who were men and women of color, to use the transfer time to visit his office and receive medical treatment without having to take time off of work and without having to pay out transportation fees to get to a doctor’s office.
Even though Cobb faced the same segregation that all minorities faced in the 1930s and 1940s, she was privy to the advantages of a middle-class upbringing. Her family continued to move into better and better neighborhoods in the city as they became available due to white families moving out of the city and into the suburbs, allowing Cobb to attend better public schools throughout her primary schooling. She learned to read at an early age and she took advantage of her father’s large home library which contained numerous scientific journals and magazines, up to date newspapers, and a thorough collection of books that chronicled the achievements of black Americans. Her parents also owned a cottage in Idlewild, Michigan, where a number of well to do black families vacationed during the summer months.
Most students during this time who came out of school with a Ph.D. in cell physiology went into a medical career, but Cobb opted to work in a biology research lab at the National Cancer Institute instead due to her love of theoretical research over pathological application. She also made sure that the lab she joined focused on cellular biology, which observes the action and interaction of living cells, instead of molecular biology, which observes mainly atoms and molecules that make up cells. At the National Cancer Institute she studied the effects of chemotherapy drugs on human cells infected with cancer, producing research that is still used today in creating new and more effective tools to fight cancer.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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As early voting began Monday in Georgia, a group of black senior citizens gathered for a voter outreach event at Jefferson County’s Leisure Center. Members of Black Voters Matter, one of the groups behind the event, offered to drive the group of about 40 seniors to the polls.
But shortly after the seniors boarded the organization’s bus, county officials stopped the trip, prompting new accusations of voter suppression in a state already dealing with several such controversies.
The event, according to ThinkProgress’s Kira Lerner, was a part of Black Voters Matter’s “The South is Rising” bus tour across seven states to host voter outreach and engagement events. Black Voters Matter is nonpartisan, and the group’s leadership did not encourage the senior citizens to vote for a particular candidate or political party, according to LaTosha Brown, the organization’s co-founder.
Jefferson County Administrator Adam Brett countered that the Monday event constituted “political activity,” noting that a local Democratic Party chair helped sponsor it.
“This is voter suppression, Southern style,” Brown told ThinkProgress. According to recent Census figures, Jefferson County is 53 percent black, and voting rights advocates cite a lack of transportation as a particularly high barrier to voting for black Georgians. Civil rights groups most recently raised this point in August when a majority-black Georgia county proposed closing all but two of its polling places.
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With Democrats furious over Donald Trump, and many Republicans furious over the treatment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the 2018 elections are likely to see the highest turnout of midterm voters in recent history.
But those voters will be confronted by a byzantine array of voter restrictions, voter-suppression efforts, and voter discrimination standing in their way. A review by The Daily Beast found at least five voter-suppression practices in active use today. All are led by Republicans, all have disproportionate effects on non-white populations, and all are rationalized by bogus claims of voter fraud. They include:
- Closing polling places in communities of color
- Purging eligible voters from the rolls without their knowledge
- Barring felons from voting
- Voter ID laws
- Eliminating early voting
Each one of these alone is troubling. In the aggregate, though, they paint an unmistakable picture of Republican efforts to hold on to power in an increasingly non-white nation by making it harder for non-white people to vote.
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White Democrats are becoming more liberal; black Democrats aren’t. That fact is driving black candidates to win by executing a savvy strategy. Politico: How 2018 Became the ‘Year of the Black Progressive’
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It’s too soon to award the moniker, but 2018 may well be remembered as the political “Year of the Black Progressive,” much as 1992 was the “Year of the Woman.”
Black women are taking office as mayors in major cities such as San Francisco and New Orleans. Record-breaking numbers of black candidates are running for office at the state level. No fewer than three black candidates are being seriously discussed as presidential nominees. And with gubernatorial candidates Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gillum in Florida and congressional candidate Ayanna Pressley in Boston, among others, Democrats have nominated young, black, progressives where they typically would nominate white moderates.
How is this happening, and why now? Simply put: White Democrats are becoming more liberal, and black candidates are running savvy, progressive campaigns that win the support of white Democrats while building a coalition with more pragmatic black voters.
Taken together with the results of the 2016 presidential primaries—in which Bernie Sanders managed to win half of black voters younger than 30, and nearly a third overall—some could interpret this rising wave of black candidates as a sign that the notoriously pragmatic black electorate is moving leftward politically. But a deeper look at the numbers and the candidates themselves suggests that something else is at play.
According to the Pew Research Center, since 2000, Democrats who identify as liberal has increased by 70 percent. But those gains came almost exclusively from white Democrats, 55 percent of whom identified as liberal in 2017, up from 28 percent in 2000. Over that same time span, the percentage of liberal black Democrats increased only marginally, growing from 25 percent in 2000 to 28 percent in 2017, with a slight drop-off following the election of Donald Trump.
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When Neville Hall dives into the waters of Kingston Harbor searching for conch and fish, he sees a lot of black. Black plastic bags waving like seaweed, black sludge coating the ocean floor — the degraded remnants of all sorts of plastic waste. But not as much conch or fish as he used to see when he started fishing in 1979.
Hall knows firsthand the toll that plastics and Styrofoam take on the ocean and the environment at large.
“The pollution kills out the mangroves, and in certain places where you would have pretty sand, mud is there. All different things happen,” Hall said.
Relief from the scourge may be in sight for Jamaica, which is among at least 20 Caribbean and Latin American nations banning — or in discussions to ban — the importation, manufacture and distribution of single-use plastic bags, straws and Styrofoam. As of Jan. 1, those items will be prohibited here, and plastic bottles will eventually be collected for reimbursement and recycled.
Jamaica is one of several island countries that have reached a tipping point about non-biodegradable waste and the daily threat it poses to paradise. It will not be easy. While the struggle to combat waste is not unique to these islands, their geography makes it harder for them than for large land masses, where landfill sites are plentiful and there is less shoreline, in proportion to the total area, on which garbage can wash up.
Although some logistics have yet to be finalized, Jamaica’s ban was inevitable, according to Daryl Vaz, minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation.
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rive for an hour into the hills that lie behind South Africa’s wild eastern coast, and you will find a game park full of rhino and big cats, a sprawling town spread over dozens of summits and dry valleys, and a vast opencast coal mine.
If all the advantages of the rainbow nation – stunning landscape and wildlife, massive mineral resources and a youthful population – are represented here, then so too are all its problems.
Somkhele is home to tens of thousands of people living in rudimentary houses on parched patches of land, many of whom would be entirely destitute without monthly welfare payments of less than £20.
Within a 15-minute drive, there is Hluhluwe–Imfolozi, the oldest nature reserve in Africa, where hundreds of rhinos, antelope and big cats graze under the wondering gaze of tourists. In between lie the rubble and workings of the opencast mine.
The tensions between the three are now reaching a critical point. The mining company wants to dig out more coal, and has been granted rights for a vast new swath of land. Activists in Somkhele have gone to court to shut the mine, or at least stop any expansion, which mining officials say would have the same result. A judgment is due within weeks and will set a precedent that could have far-reaching consequences.
“If the judge finds against us, he is saying mining companies in South Africa don’t have to comply with the law, and that is terrifying. If he finds for us, he says the law in this country is to be respected by everybody,” said Kirsten Youens, a lawyer acting for community groups in Somkhele.
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We don’t need another hero, but here’s one we’ve been waiting for anyway: Wakandan princess and genius little sister Shuri has finally broken out of her supporting role in the Black Panther franchise into her own series, courtesy of acclaimed fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor.
Okorafor, whose novel, Who Fears Death, is being developed by HBO (Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is onboard as executive producer; former Source magazine editor-in-chief Selwyn Seyfu Hinds is the screenwriter), can now add a Marvel unlimited series to her growing and esteemed resume. Her first foray with the famed comic company was last September with the release of her eight-page comic short, “Blessing in Disguise,” in the Venomverse War Stories No. 1 comic book.
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The new church in Redemption City is only half-built. Already this great aeroplane hangar of a building measures 1.5km by 1km. Compared with it, Tesla’s “gigafactory” is a poky warehouse and St Peter’s Basilica is a quaint parish church. Yet the church is not the most extraordinary thing about Redemption City.
In 1983 Enoch Adejare Adeboye, a former maths professor who had become General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, acquired a small patch of land north of Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city. At first it was used for occasional prayer meetings. But as the church grew into one of the world’s largest under Mr Adeboye’s charismatic leadership, the prayer camp turned into a permanent settlement. Today about 12,000 people live in Redemption City, which sprawls over at least 2,500 hectares. The population is expected to double by 2036.
Most African cities are messy, especially around the edges. Suburban roads are invariably crooked, unpaved and unsigned. Houses are plonked down wherever people can acquire land. Many homes are half-built, because their owners have no land titles and so cannot take out mortgages. To deter scammers, some of them are spray-painted with messages like: “This property is not for sale. Beware fraud”.
In Redemption City the streets form a grid. The roads are signed, with names like Hallelujah Close and Praise Close. Some have speed bumps—things that would be wholly redundant on a normal African road. Every plot is the same size: 21.3 metres by 21.3 metres. There are few half-built houses, because the church checks that families have enough money to complete them, and sets a strict time limit. All the homes are in gated communities, numbering 15 so far.
Everything tends to work. Whereas Lagos hums with diesel generators, Redemption City has a steady electricity supply from a small gas-fired power station. It also has its own water supply. “We make life easy,” says Pastor Fola Sanusi, the man in charge of Redemption City’s growth. The city also makes rules, of the kind that could never be enforced in the hurly-burly of Lagos. “No parking, no waiting, no trading, no hawking”, reads one sign.
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