Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Annie J. Easley (April 23, 1933 - June 25, 2011) was an African-American computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist who was born on April 23, 1933, in Birmingham, Alabama, and died June 25, 2011, in Cleveland, Ohio. She worked for the Lewis Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). She was a leading member of the team which developed software for the Centaur rocket stage and one of the first African-Americans in her field.
Annie J. Easley was born to Samuel Bird Easley and Mary Melvina Hoover and was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. In the days before the Civil Rights Movement, educational and career opportunities for African American children were very limited. African American children were educated separately from white children and their schools were most often inferior to white schools. Annie was fortunate in that her mother told her that she could be anything she wanted but she would have to work at it. She encouraged her to get a good education and from the fifth grade through high school, she attended a parochial school and was valedictorian of her graduating class.
After high school she went to New Orleans, Louisiana, to Xavier University, then an African-American Roman Catholic University, where she majored in pharmacy for about two years.
In 1954, she returned to Birmingham briefly. As part of the Jim Crow laws that established and maintained racial inequality, African Americans were required to pass an onerous literacy test and pay a poll tax in order to vote. She remembers the test giver looking at her application and saying only, "You went to Xavier University. Two dollars." Subsequently, she helped other African Americans prepare for the test. In 1963, racial segregation of Birmingham's downtown merchants ended as a result of the Birmingham campaign, and in 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment outlawed the poll tax in Federal elections. But it was not until 1965 that the Voting Rights Act eliminated the literacy test.
Shortly thereafter, she married and moved to Cleveland with the intention of continuing her studies. Unfortunately, the local university had ended its pharmacy program a short time before and no nearby alternative existed.
In 1955, she read a local newspaper article about a story on twin sisters who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) as "computers" and the next day she applied for a job. Within two weeks she was hired, one of four African Americans of about 2500 employees......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A new generation of African American agents wants basketball players to get a better deal. The college-sports organization moved to exclude new blood. The Atlantic: The NCAA Doesn’t Speak for College Athletes
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In this year’s NFL draft, Lynn became the first black woman to represent a top-three pick. In January, she is scheduled to take the National Basketball Players Association’s certification exam for agents. On her Twitter feed in June, Lynn posted a video saying she was seeking her NBPA certification and referred to it as a divine calling. “When God puts something on your heart,” Lynn said, “when he tells you it’s time to transition, or it’s time to add something in your life, you don’t ask questions—you just make a move.”
Lately, Lynn has wondered whether that move is worth it. She isn’t questioning God, but she is questioning the NCAA, which recently revised its rules for agents seeking to represent college basketball players who aren’t sure of their NBA readiness, but want to test it. Per the latest NCAA requirement, Lynn needs to have been certified by the NBPA for three years before she can work with this category of college basketball players.
“I’m trying to help change these kids’ lives, and [the NCAA] is trying to make this harder,” Lynn told me.
The NCAA certification process for agents is supposedly designed to protect players from unscrupulous people who might take advantage of them. But recent rule changes have rightly come under fire, because they would limit players’ choice of representation and would make it even harder for a new generation of black agents, including Lynn, to gain a foothold in a difficult industry.
The NCAA is a billion-dollar business built on the free labor of college athletes. Its expression of concern for the well-being of its basketball players is downright hilarious.
Last week, the NCAA circulated a memo saying that agents need to have bachelor’s degrees to represent college basketball players who are on the verge of turning pro. This requirement was nicknamed the “Rich Paul rule,” in reference to the superagent Rich Paul, the founder of Klutch Sports Group and the head of sports at United Talent Agency. Paul, who was recently on the cover of Sports Illustrated, represents the NBA stars LeBron James, Ben Simmons, Draymond Green, and Anthony Davis. Paul does not have a college degree. He got an early break because of his friendship with James and has used that leverage wisely, becoming a major power broker in the NBA.
Protecting players isn’t the highest priority for the NCAA, which appears to care most about preserving its billion-dollar business. Paul poses a threat because he put together a deal for the Oklahoma City rookie Darius Bazley last year that allowed Bazley to skip college and instead get paid $1 million for a three-month internship with New Balance, the shoe company, while training for the NBA. The last thing the NCAA seems to want is for players to feel empowered—to come to the realization that the NCAA needs them more than the other way around.
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Yesterday the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell held a joint media session at the Roc Nation offices in New York to seal a once-implausible partnership that isn’t being received as positively as both parties probably hoped.
I assume neither Goodell nor Jay-Z expected to be on the defensive once the NFL announced that it would give Roc Nation, the music mogul’s entertainment company, significant power in choosing the performers for the league’s signature events—including the coveted Super Bowl halftime show. Jay-Z and Roc Nation will also help augment the NFL’s social-justice initiatives by developing content and spaces where players can speak about the issues that concern them.
This wasn’t just another routine example of Jay-Z living out a lyric he’d rapped nearly 15 years ago—“I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man!” Instead, the rapper faced questions yesterday about why he chose to collaborate with the same league that he’d publicly criticized for its treatment of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who hasn’t had an NFL job since taking a knee during the national anthem three years ago to protest police brutality and racial injustice. This is the same Jay-Z who showed support for Kaepernick by wearing his jersey on Saturday Night Live. On his megahit song “Apeshit,” Jay-Z rapped this lyric: “Once I said no to the Super Bowl: You need me, I don’t need you. Every night we in the end zone. Tell the NFL we in stadiums too.”
Now he’s in business with the league.
Kaepernick’s girlfriend, Nessa Diab, wrote on Twitter that Kaepernick didn’t speak with Jay-Z before he brokered his deal with the NFL. Jay-Z said yesterday that he spoke to Kaepernick on Monday, but he wouldn’t divulge how their conversation went.
A source close to Kaepernick, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, told me, “It was not a good conversation.”
But it was all smiles yesterday between Jay-Z and Goodell.
“We don’t want people to come in and necessarily agree with us; we want people to come in and tell us what we can do better,” Goodell said at the press conference. “I think that’s a core element of our relationship between the two organizations, and with Jay and I personally.”
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In a call to action to doctors and other health care professionals, the American Academy of Pediatrics released its first policy statement on the affects of racism on children’s health.
The statement, which was published in the Pediatrics journal in August, is titled “The Impact of Racism on Child and Adolescent Health.” It looks at structural racism, discrimination in education and the impact of racist employment practices on families and children. The pediatricians who wrote the statement also considered racial disparities in birth weight and maternal mortality in the United States and how they are connected to poor prenatal and overall medical care.
“Racism is a significant social determinant of health clearly prevalent in our society now,” co-author Dr. Maria Trent, a professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told The New York Times.
Per the statement:
The impact of racism has been linked to birth disparities and mental health problems in children and adolescents. The biological mechanism that emerges from chronic stress leads to increased and prolonged levels of exposure to stress hormones and oxidative stress at the cellular level. Prolonged exposure to stress hormones, such as cortisol, leads to inflammatory reactions that predispose individuals to chronic disease. As an example, racial disparities in the infant mortality rate remain, and the complications of low birth weight have been associated with perceived racial discrimination and maternal stress.
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The blue waters of the Chesapeake lap against the shore. Sunbathers lounge in deckchairs as black children and white children run and play on the beach. And close by stands a magnificent oak tree, its trunk stretching three great arms and canopies of leaves high into the tranquil sky.
Over half a millennium, the Algernoune Oak has witnessed war and peace and the fall of empires, but never a day like the one in late August 1619. It was here that the White Lion, a 160-ton English privateer ship, landed at what was then known as Point Comfort. On board were more than 20 captives seized from the Kingdom of Ndongo in Angola and transported across the Atlantic. This dislocated, unwilling, violated group were the first enslaved Africans to set foot in English North America – ushering in the era of slavery in what would become the United States.
This site, now Fort Monroe in Hampton, southern Virginia, will host a weekend of 400th anniversary commemorations on 23-25 August, culminating in a symbolic release of butterflies and nationwide ringing of bells. Americans of all races will reflect on a historical pivot point that illuminates pain and suffering but also resilience and reinvention. Some see an opportunity for a national reckoning and debate on reparations.
For a people robbed of an origins story, it is also an invitation to go in search of roots – the African in African American.
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systems are being developed to identify language used to target marginalized populations online. It’s concerning if the same systems are discriminating against the population they’re designed to protect. Color Lines: AI Used to Curb Hate on Twitter Actually Punishes Black People
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Tweets believed to have been written by Black users are noted as sexist, hateful, harassing or abusive at higher rates than those thought to have been tweeted by White users, says a studyreleased this month by researchers at Cornell University. The artificial intelligence bias was so stark that in some cases, the algorithm flagged what it thought was Black speech more than twice as frequently.
The researchers analyzed five datasets marked for abusive language, totaling a combined 270,000 Twitter posts, where all five had been flagged by humans as abusive language or hate speech. The researchers then trained a machine learning model to predict hateful or offensive speech for each set and tested the results against a sixth database of more than 59 million tweets that included Census data, location identifiers and words associated with specific demographics. While a Twitter user’s race couldn’t be confirmed, tweets were classified as either “Black-aligned” or “White-aligned. The researchers say the datasets likely aren’t the exact ones Twitter uses, but note that the consistency of the results suggests widespread racial bias, which they attribute to an oversampling of Black people’s tweets, implicit bias and poor training.
“These systems are being developed to identify language that’s used to target marginalized populations online,” the study’s co-author Thomas Davidson said in a statement issued shortly after the team presented the paper. “It’s extremely concerning if the same systems are themselves discriminating against the population they’re designed to protect.”
Researchers say that to fix this racial bias, the people who initially enter the data into these social media platforms need better training on diverse language and that companies should develop systems that are sensitive enough to detect different social and cultural contexts.
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Accused of atrocities, Cameroon is only the latest to jump in, employing a firm that just brought on Donald Trump’s former acting attorney general. Foreign Policy: African Governments Rush to Hire Trump-Linked Lobbyists
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The lobbying firm that represents an African government accused of atrocities has hired U.S. President Donald Trump’s former acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker—the latest in a recent surge of contracts with African countries seeking to improve their image in Washington.
Whitaker, who is joining Clout Public Affairs as managing director, will not be working directly on the contract with the government of Cameroon and will not be filing as a lobbyist, a Clout Public Affairs spokesperson told Foreign Policy. Clout finalized the contract well before Whitaker joined the firm. But human rights activists say Whitaker’s hiring will bring outsized influence to a firm looking to burnish Cameroon’s image in Washington as its government faces accusations of widespread human rights abuses against civilians.
The Clout spokesperson said it is an important time to strengthen ties between the U.S.and Cameroonian governments as the country faces growing instability and threats Human Rights Watch, who said torture “is systematically practiced in legal and illegal detention facilities.”
The contract also represents the latest in a growing list of African governments pouring money into lobbying firms to carve out more influence in Washington under Trump,whose surrogates and campaign affiliates have cashed in on lobbying for foreign governments, catching the attention of human rights advocates and public transparency watchdogs.
“Over the past several years, there has been a hugely significant increase in the number of U.S. lobbyists representing foreign nationals, many of them connected to the Trump administration,” said Jeffrey Smith, the executive director of Vanguard Africa, which supports democracy movements in the region. “Many of Trump’s fundraisers and supporters have struck it rich in this sector, often working on behalf of the world’s worst human rights abusers,” said Smith, who has done work on behalf of Cameroonian opposition figures. He cited Zimbabwe, which hired the Trump-linked lobbying group Ballard Partners in a bid to scrap long-standing U.S. sanctions, as well as Clout’s work for Cameroon.
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a single negative interaction with a police officer can alter a life forever. Also how a shift in how the nation approaches justice can prevent the criminalization of people of color. Color Lines: How Can Rethinking Policing Reverse the Mass Incarceration Epidemic?
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The Vera Institute of Justice released a report Tuesday (August 13) that digs into the role law enforcement officers play in mass incarceration. “Gatekeepers: The Role of Police in Ending Mass Incarceration” asserts that policing practices across the country “have increased the likelihood that arrests will result in incarceration,” especially within communities of color.
As criminal justice reform continues to be a political and social priority, this study stresses the importance of reforming police work, which is the “front end of the system.” The writers argue that a shift in focus is essential to decrease “the numbers of people in prison and jail,” to create “constructive pathways for people returning to their communities” and to address “the stark racial and ethnic disparities that have been a primary feature of the American criminal justice system.”
The report cites arrest data from 1997 to 2008 and concludes that “one out of three young adults—and nearly half of all Black men—had an arrest record by age 23.” Additionally, young adults today are 36 percent more likely to be arrested than their parents’ were at the same age. And maybe more importantly, “a person arrested today is far more likely to land in jail.”
That incarceration frequently leads to even more dire consequences. According to the report:
Just a few days in jail increase a person’s likelihood of being found guilty, receiving a harsher sentence and committing a future crime. As a result of a bewildering number of legal and regulatory penalties, disabilities or disqualifications that flow from involvement with the criminal justice system, people with arrest records—even if the charges against them are later dropped—have a harder time maintaining or finding employment, credit or housing.
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