COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
BY BLACK KOS EDITOR, SEPHIUS1
Daniel Hale Williams was born on January 18, 1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He was the fifth of seven children born to Daniel and Sarah Williams. Daniel’s father was a barber and moved the family to Annapolis, Maryland but died shortly thereafter of tuberculosis. Daniel’s mother realized she could not manage the entire family and sent some of the children to live with relatives. Daniel was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore but ran away to join his mother who had moved to Rockford, Illinois. He later moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin where he joined his sister and opened his own barber shop. After moving to nearby Janesville, Daniel became fascinated with a local physician and decided to follow his path.
He began working as an apprentice to the physician (Dr. Henry Palmer) for two years and in 1880 entered what is now known as Northwestern University Medical School. After graduation from Northwestern in 1883, he opened his own medical office in Chicago, Illinois.
Because of primitive social and medical circumstances existing in that era, much of Williams early medical practice called for him to treat patients in their homes, including conducting occasional surgeries on kitchen tables. In doing so, Williams utilized many of the emerging antiseptic, sterilization procedures of the day and thereby gained a reputation for professionalism. He was soon appointed as a surgeon on the staff of the South Side Dispensary and then a clinical instructor in anatomy at Northwestern. In 1889 he was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health and one year later set for to create an interracial hospital.
Daniel Hale Williams — Founder of Provident Hospital, Chicago
On January 23, 1891 Daniel Hale Williams established the Provident Hospital and Training School Association, a three story building which held 12 beds and served members of the community as a whole.
The school also served to train Black nurses and utilized doctors of all races. Within its first year, 189 patients were treated at Provident Hospital and of those 141 saw a complete recovery, 23 had recovered significantly, three had seen change in their condition and 22 had died. For a brand new hospital, at that time, to see an 87% success rate was phenomenal considering the financial and health conditions of the patient, and primitive conditions of most hospitals. Much can be attributed to Williams insistence on the highest standards concerning procedures and sanitary conditions....Read more here
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Minnesota police are investigating reports that a white man flashed a gun at a group of black teenagers at a McDonalds on Monday night after making a racist comment, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
In video taken by one of the teenagers and posted to Twitter, a group of Somali-American teenagers can be seen confronting the man, who is leaving the store at that point. All at once the group flinches and turns to run away from the man, and one of the teenager yells, “he has a gun.” The gun cannot be seen in the video.
Seconds later, a manager confronts the teenagers and tells them leave the McDonald’s. When they try to explain to her that a man had threatened them with a gun, she responds, “I don’t give a f-ck, get out of my store now.”
A bystander then intervenes. “Don’t send them off there when a dude just pulled a f--king gun on them,” he says. “You’ve got to call the f--king cops is what you’ve got to do.” The manager still insists the teenagers leave the store—something they told the Star Tribune they did not do, instead choosing to wait for the police to arrive.
In another video, another McDonald’s employee tells the teenagers that they are causing a disruption and that “he pulled out a gun for a reason.”
Seventeen-year-old Jihan Abdullahi told the Star Tribune that she and a friend had been trying to pay for an order with Apple Pay at the McDonald’s when the man became angry, voicing frustration at them for holding up the line. She said she and the friend struggled with the app and finally gave up, canceling the order. Then, as they were walking away, the man said under his breath that it hadn’t worked because they were paying with electronic benefit transfer, which allows those with government-funded food assistance to make purchases with a card. She said she asked the man, “Just because I’m black, you think my friends and I live under EBT?” The man responded, “Yes.”
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A Black man at home minding his business and jamming to some old-school hip hop, had the cops called on him because his neighbors thought he was beating up his fiancée but instead he was spitting a line from Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” rhyme.
And if you’re familiar with the tail-end proclamation of the song’s chorus — “a b*tch ain’t one” of the 99 problems the rapper professes to have.
However, Spring Hill, Tenn., resident Davon Eddington explains to police were called to his home due to a nosey neighbor who was eavesdropping and got the facts all wrong.
Eddington said he was in his backyard and talking on the phone with his brother about basketball and LA Lakers’ star LeBron James.The conversation got animated as if often does with sports enthusiasts, and Eddington said his brother called him a bandwagon fan, he hit back with the line from the popular rhyme, “I got 99 problems, but a b*tch ain’t one.”
The nosey neighbor took that as a cue to intervene and called the cops and reported that Eddington was committing a violent act on his partner. His fiancée, however, was busy taking a bath.
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Barack Obama surprised volunteers at the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a nonprofit that provides meals to more than 700 food pantries and shelters throughout Cook, County Illinois on Tuesday.
The former president wore a Chicago White Sox hat and arrived with staff from the Obama Foundation caring bags of donated food. The team worked alongside volunteers of the charity organization to bag potatoes for Thanksgiving meals.
“Hey, how’s it going?” Obama said to volunteers as in walked inside, according to CNN. “This is a spiffy-looking spot right here.”
The food depository uploaded a video to Twitter of the former commander-in-chief interacting with the workers on the prep line.
“You guys are doing such a great job helping out,” Obama told two young girls helping. One of them gasped and clasped her mouth in shock and excitement.
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Tidal just launched its first animated project, Footprints, a series dedicated to celebrating the African and Indigenous roots of Latin music that are often overlooked. Episode one, which is narrated by Afro-Latinx artist Amara La Negra, highlights the work of black Latinx like Joe Arroyo and Celia Cruz.
“The irony is that we could never escape our blackness regardless of how we define or quantify it because it lives everywhere; in our foods, our religions, our medical practice and of course the music we create and rhythms we move to before we can even speak,” says Amara La Negra in episode one.
Thanks to musicians like Cardi B, Bad Bunny and Amara La Negra, both English and Spanish language music created by Latinx artists has gained recent mainstream visibility. Still, conversations surrounding these music genres often erase the contributions of the black Latinx creators who paved the way for and propelled non-black Latinx superstars today.
The episode breaks down classic tracks like Joe Arroyo’s “Rebelión” and “La Negra Tiene Tumbao” by Celia Cruz, and also delves into the Afro-Puerto Rican roots of Reggaetón, a genre that has been politicized and historically looked down upon by many non-black Latinx.
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Free bobi wine!” say the graffiti outside his recording studio in Kamwokya, a poor district of Kampala, Uganda’s capital. On August 13th the pop star-turned-politician (pictured above) was arrested and, he says, beaten and tortured by soldiers. Though he was released after two weeks, treason charges still hang over him.
His real crime is being popular. Born Robert Kyagulanyi, Mr Wine speaks for many of Kampala’s roughly 1.5m slum dwellers. “If parliament cannot come to the ghetto,” he said after his election as an mp, “the ghetto will come to the parliament.”
Mr Wine is part of a broader trend in which upstart politicians with support among the urban poor are rattling governments. They include Kenya’s main opposition leader, Raila Odinga, and Nelson Chamisa of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change (mdc). In South Africa Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters has been gaining ground by promising to seize white-owned land.
The past few years have also seen widespread protests by city folk. Witness the “Black Friday” demonstrations in Lusaka (Zambia’s capital) in 2013 and “Red Friday” marches in Accra (Ghana’s) in 2014, or the post-election riots in Kenya last year.
The rise of urban discontent and young opposition leaders partly reflects a youth bulge. The median age in Africa is 19.5, whereas its leaders’ average age is 62. It also arises from Africa’s idiosyncratic urbanisation, whereby cities are growing fast but opportunities in them are not.
In 1960, 15% of Africans lived in cities, about the same as in Europe in the 1600s. Today the share is 38%. By 2030 it will surpass 50%. Africa’s urban population is expanding at a rate of 4% per year, twice the global average. Yet urbanisation is not bringing Africa the prosperity it brought to other continents. In Europe and East Asia the growth of cities was driven by migration from the countryside, as workers swapped fields for factories. African urbanisation is mostly a result of natural population growth. For example, in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, just 12% of the population rise is accounted for by migration from rural areas. Since there are few manufacturing jobs, most of the growing urban labour force is absorbed by the informal economy. That is one reason why urbanisation in Africa does not reduce poverty as much as it does in other continents.
Another reason is the woeful way cities are organised. More than 50% of urbanites live in slums. Fully 40% lack flushing toilets. Many capitals still rely on out-of-date planning laws, leading to haphazard building and needlessly expensive rent.
Nairobi, Kenya
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