Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Today's inventor is someone who took advantage of the good seed planted by his grandfather, who was born a slave and had two of his fingers cut off for trying to learn how to read and write. His name is Percy Julian.
Percy Julian synthesized physostigmine for treatment of glaucoma; and synthesized cortisone for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Percy Julian is also noted for inventing a fire-extinguishing foam for gasoline and oil fires.
Born in Montgomery, Alabama and one of six children, Percy Julian had little schooling. At that time, Montgomery provided limited public education for Blacks. However, Percy Julian entered DePauw University as a "sub-freshman" and graduated in 1920 as class valedictorian. Percy Julian then taught chemistry at Fisk University, and in 1923, earned a master's degree from Harvard University. In 1931, Percy Julian received his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna.
Percy Julian returned to DePauw University, where his reputation for inventing was established in 1935 by his synthesizing physostigmine from the calabar bean. Percy Julian went on to become director of research at the Glidden Company, a paint and varnish manufacturer. He developed a process for isolating and preparing soy bean protein, which could be used to coat and size paper, to create cold water paints, and to size textiles. During World War II, Percy Julian used a soy protein to produce AeroFoam, which suffocates gasoline and oil fires.
Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater had this to say about Percy Julian:
"Those who had earlier sought to keep their slaves in chains were well aware of the threat education posed to their 'peculiar' institution. Consider what happened to the grandfather of Dr. Percy Julian, the great Black research chemist who, over his lifetime, was awarded 105 patents--among them a treatment for glaucoma and a low-cost process to produce cortisone....
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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When Victor H. Green’s “The Negro Travelers’ Green Book” series was being published (from 1936 to 1964), it was a literal lifesaver for Black travelers looking for safe passage during segregation. Since 2016, photographer Jonathan Calm has been revisiting the book’s sites to create a new archive of black and white images that explores the idea of being free to drive across America while Black.
“There were definitely more dangerous times to be a Black motorist, even though it doesn’t feel like that today,” Calm told KQED in a video interview. “We have way too many Black men and women being pulled out of cars, being killed by police officers. So my project is to look at the past to understand where we are today.”
In Calm’s “Travel is Fatal to Prejudice” series (2017-18) the New York City-based artist superimposed a target symbol over Google Map aerial views cities, then labeled them with the names of Black people who were victimized while driving, including Rodney King, Philando Castile and Sandra Bland. According to the series description, it is meant to evoke “the cyclical nature of a history of violent oppression that keeps repeating itself, at the risk of desensitizing the public.”
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The opening of a movie studio might not seem like a big deal, but when Tyler Perry does it, it is a historic event. The entertainment mogul opened the doors to his Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta on October 5, and it seems like every bold-faced name in Black Hollywood flew down South for the celebration. And there was a lot to celebrate: Perry’s studio is not only a tribute to Black excellence, its location bears special meaning: it’s sprawled over 330 acres of what was once a Confederate army base.
“The studio was once a Confederate Army base,” he said. “And, I want you to hear this, which meant that there was Confederate soldiers on that base, plotting and planning on how to keep 3.9 million negroes enslaved. Now that land is owned by one negro.”
“While everybody was fighting for a seat at the table talking about #OscarsSoWhite, #OscarsSoWhite, I said, ‘Y’all go ahead and do that,’” he said. “But while you’re fighting for a seat at the table, I’ll be down in Atlanta building my own. Because what I know for sure is that if I could just build this table, God will prepare it for me in the presence of my enemies.”
The landmark space features 12 soundstages named after Black Hollywood icons, including the late Diahann Carroll, Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Halle Berry, Sydney Poitier, Della Reese, Spike Lee, Harry Belafonte, Cicely Tyson, Whoopi Goldberg and Will Smith.
A testament to Perry’s influence and good will in Hollywood, the gala opening drew huge celebrity names like Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, and even Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Bey even posted a rare caption to Instagram alongside her pics, saying she “could not stop crying” over the significance of the event. “I could feel our ancestors’ presence,” she wrote. “Generations of blood, sweat and tears, success, excellence and brilliance. It makes me so proud, so full, I could not stop crying. Thank you my Virgo brother for so much love and passion put into every detail. My prayer today is that you will take it all in. You inspire me to dream even bigger.”
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In 1998, Sirak Asfaw, a Dutch civil servant who was born in Ethiopia, noticed something shiny in the suitcase of a guest who was staying at his house. Curious, he opened the case to find a glittering gilded crown inside.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Mr. Sirak, who moved to the Netherlands a political refugee in the 1970s, said in a recent interview in Amsterdam. “I felt betrayed. Using my house to smuggle cultural heritage from Ethiopia? I knew it had something to do with Ethiopian history, the Ethiopian kingdom. I knew this is not good.”
Mr. Sirak said that he felt he couldn’t return the crown to the Ethiopian authorities, because he suspected that the government might have been complicit in the theft, and he feared that it would be stolen again.
He also didn’t want to hand it over to the Dutch authorities, because he worried that a museum would keep the crown forever rather than returning it when a new Ethiopian government was in place.
So Mr. Sirak locked the visitor out of his house, he said, and removed the crown from the suitcase. He did not identify the smuggler to The New York Times for fear of his safety, and said he didn’t know how his guest had acquired it.
For 21 years, he hid it in his home. “When I saw it, I always felt very emotional,” he said. “I knew it shouldn’t be here, not in my house, not in the Netherlands.”
Last year, after Ethiopia installed a new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, Mr. Sirak decided that it was time to try to return the crown, confident that the new government would handle the return properly, he said.
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For decades he has been reviled as a simple-minded and sadistic dictator, or lampooned as a clownish thug.
Now tens of thousands of newly discovered images have shown how Idi Amin exploited cutting-edge media technology, populism and radical ideologies to maintain his bloody grip on power in the 1970s.
Most of the 70,000 pictures were taken by a team of photographers from the information ministry who followed the Ugandan dictator over the course of his eight-year rule. Many show Amin at public occasions, but some are of private episodes, such as the arrest and humiliation of alleged petty criminals shortly before their execution.
Others are more intimate, showing the dictator with his family or close associates, and were taken by officials and associates. Amin is seen with his children surrounded by Christmas decorations, playing the accordion and swimming.
Historians say the images, found in a locked filing cabinet at the Ugandan state broadcaster’s offices by archivists four years ago but only now given a public view, provide extraordinary new insights into Amin and the nature of his regime, which was one of the worst in post-colonial Africa. They also cast new light on the reality of life for ordinary Ugandans under the rule of a man held responsible for between 100,000 and 500,000 deaths.
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The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday to Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali. The 43-year-old former intelligence officer came to power in April 2018 and undertook ambitious democratic reforms, including lifting bans on opposition political parties and media outlets, releasing thousands of political prisoners, and bringing to an end the country’s state of emergency. Abiy is seen as having a unique ability to traverse the country’s ethnic and religious divides because of his mixed Christian and Muslim background and fluency in three of the country’s primary languages. The changes made under Abiy’s regime have set the stage for the country, Africa’s second most populous, to hold its first free, multiparty elections next year. The committee acknowledged the strides made domestically during Abiy’s short tenure, but stressed the importance of his leadership in ending a decades-long standoff with neighbor Eritrea following a bloody 1998-2000 border war.
“When Abiy Ahmed became Prime Minister in April 2018, he made it clear that he wished to resume peace talks with Eritrea,” the committee said in a statement. “In close cooperation with Isaias Afwerki, the President of Eritrea, Abiy Ahmed quickly worked out the principles of a peace agreement to end the long ‘no peace, no war’ stalemate between the two countries… An important premise for the breakthrough was Abiy Ahmed’s unconditional willingness to accept the arbitration ruling of an international boundary commission in 2002.”
The peace deal reestablished diplomatic ties between the two countries, as well as everyday bonds, like phone lines and flights between the two sides that share ethnic and cultural bonds. “In the days that followed this breakthrough, some Ethiopians called Eritrean numbers randomly, and vice versa, just to speak to someone on the other side, simply because they could. Others tracked down parents, siblings and friends,” the New York Times notes. “When the first commercial Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, landed on July 18 last year, passengers stepping off the plane fell to their knees and kissed the ground. Two sisters separated from their father in the war, stuck on opposite sides of the border, embraced him for the first time after 20 years of growing up without him.”
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Montgomery, a city where more than half the population is black and known as the birthplace of the civil rights movement, elected an African American to the highest position in municipal government for the first time in its 200-year history.
Steven Reed, the Montgomery County probate judge, on Tuesday beat television station owner David Woods in a runoff, gaining 32,918 votes to Woods' 16,010 votes with 47 precincts of 47 precincts, according to incomplete, unofficial returns. He will be sworn into office Nov. 12 at Montgomery City Hall.
Reed was the first African American elected as the county's probate judge in 2012. In 2015, he was the first probate judge in Alabama to issue same-sex marriage licenses.
"This election has never been about me," Reed said in his victory speech. "This election has never been about just my ideas. It's been about all the hopes and dreams we have as individuals and collectively in this city."
Montgomery is one of only three cities in six Deep South states with a population of 100,000 or more that had not previously elected an African American as mayor. Beginning in the late 1960s, the election of first black mayors in Cleveland, Ohio, Newark, New Jersey, Detroit, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, and Los Angeles manifested black power, said Derryn Eroll Moten, chairman of Alabama State University's Department of History and Political Science.
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Statehood fights have always revolved around race and partisanship. Slate: Getting to 51
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“When they say it’s not about race and partisanship,” said Virginia Democratic Rep.
Gerry Connolly, “you can be sure it’s about race and partisanship.” He was speaking to his Republican opponents in last month’s congressional hearing on whether D.C. should be granted statehood with full representation. But he could have been describing the majority of debates over statehood dating back to the country’s founding.
The September hearing marked the first time the House took up the question of D.C.
statehood in 25 years. It’s been an uphill climb even to get to this point. The clean, even rows of 50 stars on the flag often seem immutable. But the union as we know it did not simply spring from some noble constitutional wellspring. Debates over statehood have always been a messy, lurching process in which Americans argue over what kind of country they want.
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The fight between pro-slavery and free states for power in Washington dominated union expansion debates throughout the early 19th century. Most famously the Missouri Compromise of 1820 added Maine—formerly a territory of Massachusetts—to the union to counterbalance the new slave state of Missouri and set a border between slave and nonslave state territory for the new states that were to be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase.
Long after slavery was abolished, race has persisted as the chief concern in defining the union.
By the end of the 19th century, the U.S. had also started to acquire an overseas empire—purchasing Alaska in 1867, annexing Hawaii in 1898, and taking sovereignty over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War that same year.
The relatively rapid influx of foreign territories threatened the racial balance of power. Until this point, the U.S. government considered territories and those within them to have full protection of the Constitution. So the Supreme Court cases drew a new line in a series of early 20th century cases known as the Insular Cases, which distinguished between “incorporated” and “unincorporated” territories. The Constitution only applied fully in the former, which included Hawaii and Alaska—because they had been granted constitutional rights in Congress—but not in Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, or American Samoa. The justices didn’t mince words about what they saw as the danger of providing full citizenship rights to “uncivilized races” for whom governance by “Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible.”
Residents of the U.S. territories—with the complicated exception of American Samoa—would eventually attain citizenship, though the legacy of the legal doctrine that holds these territories as less than fully American remains, giving Congress say over laws passed in the territories.
For decades, there was still stiff opposition preventing Hawaii and Alaska from becoming fully empowered states. Hawaii’s multicultural population and Alaska’s large number of indigenous residents generated the predictable racial fearmongering. Historian Claus-M. Naske writes, “[A] common inquiry in private conversation about Hawaiian statehood was a whispered ‘how would you like to have a United States Senator called Moto?’ ”
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