Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Sylvester James Gates, Jr. (born December 15, 1950) is an American theoretical physicist, known for work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He is currently the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park and serves on President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Gates received BS (1973) and PhD (1977) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis was the first at MIT on supersymmetry. With M.T. Grisaru, M. Rocek, and W. Siegel, Gates co-authored Superspace (1984), the first comprehensive book on supersymmetry.
Gates was nominated by the Department of Energy as one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's "Nifty Fifty" Speakers to present his work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010. He is on the board of trustees of Society for Science & the Public.
Gates was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT (2010-11) and is a Residential Scholar at MIT's Simmons Hall. He is pursuing ongoing research into string theory, supersymmetry, and supergravity at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.
Recently Gates has been featured in TurboTax and Verizon commercials and has a been featured extensively on NOVA PBS programs on physics, notably "The Elegant Universe" (2003). He completed a DVD series titled Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality (2006) for The Teaching Company consisting of 24 half-hour lectures to make the complexities of unification theory comprehensible to laypeople. During the 2008 World Science Festival, Gates narrated a ballet "The Elegant Universe", where he gave a public presentation of the artistic forms connected to his scientific research. Gates Appeared on the 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Theory of Everything, hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Gates also appeared in the BBC Horizon documentary The Hunt for Higgs in 2012. Gates recently appeared in another NOVA documentary "Big Bang Machine" in 2015......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Every Sunday for the last six years, artist Nikkolas Smith has taken out his iPad in his Los Angeles home, blocking out a few hours to paint whatever comes to mind. Sometimes his subjects are topical—famous figures or events that made the news. Other times, he’ll experiment with landscapes and techniques. Last month, as he was scrolling through the news on Saturday night, he came across the story that 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson was shot and killed by a Texas police officer.
The story was so familiar, Smith wasn’t sure if he had heard it before—earlier that week, former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in prison for fatally shooting Botham Jean in his Dallas apartment. The details of Jefferson’s case—a young woman playing video games with her nephew at her mother’s home, brutally and unexpectedly killed by a police officer who had been called on a non-emergency line because the doors to the home were open—immediately struck Smith. He was angry about the senselessness of Jefferson’s death, but also wary of how the police would ultimately shape the narrative of her killing, spinning their version of events to make Jefferson look culpable. If past incidents of police brutality were any indication, the police would try to make her look “subhuman,” he said.
He knew he had to draw her. And he knew how he wanted to draw her: on the couch, relishing what would be the final moments of her life, playing video games alongside her 8-year-old nephew. In doing so, Smith created a piece that resonated so widely it became viral—but also serves as an instruction to how we remember and honor victims of state violence.
“I’ve got to recreate this moment of them having a joyful time because there’s so much heartbreak in this story,” Smith, walking through his process, told The Root. “A lot of these stories don’t make national headlines unless they’re very tragic and horrific...and people often times don’t see the joy that was there, or the life that was there.”
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Artist Dread Scott organized hundreds in Louisiana for a two-day event that will re-imagine the largest revolt of enslaved people in American history. Color Lines: Slave Rebellion to be Reenacted
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For more than a century, Civil War reenactments have played out, but this November 8 and November 9, the nation’s largest rebellion of enslaved people, the German Coast Uprising of 1811 in Louisiana, will also be reenacted.
The two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment (SRR), organized by artist-activist Dread Scott and filmed by John Akomfrah, is a community-engaged performance and film production that will include hundreds of reenactors dressed in period costumes who “will animate a suppressed history of people with an audacious plan to organize and seize Orleans Territory, to fight not just for their own emancipation, but to end slavery,” according to the event’s website. The rebellion was inspired by the Haitian revolution, but conceived by people born in Louisiana and Africa, and its goal was to march to New Orleans and establish a free republic, Ibrahima Seck, director of research at the Whitney Plantation and a historical advisor to the reenactment, told the Associated Press.
“Seeing hundreds of Black folk with machetes and muskets and sickles and sabers, flags flying, chanting to traditional African drumming, is going be an amazing moment,” Scott said. “You can’t actually understand American society if you don’t understand slavery, and you can’t understand slavery if you don’t understand slave revolts.”
Beyond showing an often neglected aspect of American history, the organizers see other benefits in the event. “With this project, it’s highlighting the tenacity and the resilience that the people who were enslaved had to want to break free, to want to create their own republic,” said reenactor Julie Joseph. “I think that’s something that’s been really encouraging to me and something that’ll be really encouraging to a lot of other Black people, to know that I come from fighters.”
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The wheels of progress turn slowly. But while slow, things are surely progressing in the fashion industry—which is good because the streets are (always) watching. After a tumultuous year that began with culturally insensitive gaffes followed by any number of corrective measures, we have steadily kept our watch on the industry for initiatives, opportunities, breakthroughs and big wins—particularly for the community who has arguably provided the most inspiration without wielding the same power and influence.
With that in mind, we are thrilled to report that womenswear designer Christopher John Rogers is the 2019 winner of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, a prize that grants $400,000 and a year of mentorship from a CFDA member to the 25-year-old Baton Rouge, La., native.
“I am so grateful to my parents for giving up so much that allowed me to be here, to my team who, through all the full-time jobs and all the leaving early, allow us to make this collection, and thank you to the judges for seeing something in me,” Rogers said in his acceptance speech, as reported by Vogue.
The Fashion Fund win caps a big year for the Brooklyn-based Rogers, who mounted his first show at New York Fashion Week this September and has reportedly found fans in Michelle Obama, Lizzo, and Tracee Ellis Ross, among others. And as 2018 winner Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss can attest, funding and endorsement from the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) can be game-changing for any growing label.
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Slate's wildly popular investigative podcast, Slow Burn, is back for its third season, which dives into the murders of two of the biggest hip-hop stars of the 1990s — Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.
Although the subject might seem like a left turn (Slow Burn's first two seasons focused on the Watergate scandal and Bill Clinton's impeachment, respectively), it fits into the show's commitment to carefully covering the biggest stories of the past 50 years.
In their heyday, Tupac and "Biggie" were at the center of a feud between East Coast and West Coast rappers. Tupac was killed in September 1996 in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting, and although there have been multiple police and journalistic investigations, no one was ever convicted for the crime. Six months later, The Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down in Los Angeles, and his murder also went unsolved. Naturally, rumors have swirled about a potential connection between each rapper's death and their legendary feud.
Slow Burn has set a strong precedent of diving past surface level on its subjects, and season three is no exception. "We had a sense of what generally animated the beef, but we didn't know the stories underneath that," season three host Joel Anderson says. "So that's what we're trying to do with this podcast — talking to people that were there at the time, figuring out all these lovely little relationships and incidents that led up to their deaths."
The first episode shifts the mainstream narrative: Pac and Biggie were initially friends, Anderson says. They met at a party in LA and Pac took Biggie under his wing, but that friendship shattered when Pac was shot five times upon entering a studio in New York. Pac, who survived, noticed that members of Biggie's crew, Junior M.A.F.I.A., were on-site and believed it was a setup.
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After a nine-month existence as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, an iconic 10-mile thoroughfare on Kansas City’s East Side will once again be known as The Paseo, Kansas City voters decided by an overwhelming margin Tuesday.
Save The Paseo, the grassroots group that pushed for restoration of the boulevard’s original name, cruised to victory. Unofficial results showed nearly 70% of voters favoring The Paseo with just two of 124 precincts in the Jackson County portion of Kansas City still not reporting late in the evening. All other precincts across the city reported results.
The outcome was a stunning rebuke of the City Council’s January decision to rename The Paseo to honor King, the late civil rights leader. Now, Kansas City is expected to take down well over 100 signs along the road, which cuts through the heart of the predominantly black East Side.
Tuesday’s long-awaited election ends a period of uncertainty over the fate of the MLK Blvd. name. Shortly after the City Council approved the renaming, a group of residents that later became Save The Paseo launched a petition drive to put the issue to voters. They argued that the Paseo name is a significant part of Kansas City’s history.
Designed in the late 19th century by landscape architect George Kessler as part of the city’s original parks and boulevard system, the road is named for Paseo De La Reforma in Mexico City. A portion of the street was added to the National Register of Historic Places along with parks and boulevards in Midtown and the Historic Northeast.
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The prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, annoyed that Harvard University has ignored repeated requests from his government to make amends for Antiguan slave labor contributions to the creation of Harvard Law School, has personally written to the university’s president to get results.
Harvard’s failure to acknowledge its obligations to the eastern Caribbean nation at a time when other universities are acknowledging their ties to slavery and making reparations is “shocking if not immoral,” Prime Minister Gaston Browne said.
“Reparation from Harvard would compensate for its development on the backs of our people,” Browne wrote in an Oct. 30 letter to Harvard President Lawrence Bacow. “Reparation is not aid; it is not a gift; it is compensation to correct the injustices of the past and restore equity. Harvard should be in the forefront of this effort.”
In a response to Browne dated Tuesday, Bacow said the Harvard Corporation in 2016 approved the removal of the law school’s shield, which included symbols drawn from the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., the Antigua slaveholder who left land to Harvard College in his will to establish its first professorship in 1815 that led to the creation of Harvard Law School. Soon after, a stone memorial recognizing “the enslaved whose labor created wealth that made possible the founding of Harvard Law School” was mounted in the plaza.
“These were significant steps for our entire community,” Bacow wrote, adding that the university recognizes “that there is more work to be done.”
“Harvard is determined to take additional steps to explore this institution’s historical relationship with slavery and the challenging moral questions that arise when confronting past injustices and their legacies,” Bacow wrote.
Browne told the Miami Herald that Bacow’s response is “disingenuous.”
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Last year, Mississippi’s Jackson Free Press unearthed a photograph of a young cheerleader, Cindy Hyde-Smith, one of a group of girls surrounding a “Rebel” mascot holding a Confederate battle flag. The photo came from a 1975 yearbook from Lawrence County Academy, the high school the U.S. senator—then engaged in a reelection campaign—once attended. Lawrence was founded as a segregation academy—one of thousands of private schools white Southerners in 11 states started after the Brown v. Board decision as a way of keeping their kids away from their black peers. Later, Hyde-Smith enrolled her own daughter at another school that was first founded as a “seg academy.”
Hyde-Smith, a Republican, won her runoff election and secured her seat despite this revelation (and despite other racist gaffes committed in the course of her campaign). The episode made journalist and Mississippi resident Ellen Ann Fentress, who graduated from Pillow Academy, a segregation academy near Greenwood, think about the many alumni of such schools who surrounded her. Fentress said in an interview that she heard author Kiese Laymon give a talk at a bookstore in Jackson after photos of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s racist 1984 yearbook page surfaced in early 2019. “Laymon said, ‘How come is it when there are these photos of white people in blackface, everybody says, ‘You know, that’s not me’?” she recalled. “He said, ‘You know what I want? I want to see a white person who was in one of these photos say, ‘Yes, this is me, and this is what I was thinking.’ ”
Last year, Mississippi’s Jackson Free Press unearthed a photograph of a young cheerleader, Cindy Hyde-Smith, one of a group of girls surrounding a “Rebel” mascot holding a Confederate battle flag. The photo came from a 1975 yearbook from Lawrence County Academy, the high school the U.S. senator—then engaged in a reelection campaign—once attended. Lawrence was founded as a segregation academy—one of thousands of private schools white Southerners in 11 states started after the Brown v. Board decision as a way of keeping their kids away from their black peers. Later, Hyde-Smith enrolled her own daughter at another school that was first founded as a “seg academy.”
Hyde-Smith, a Republican, won her runoff election and secured her seat despite this revelation (and despite other racist gaffes committed in the course of her campaign). The episode made journalist and Mississippi resident Ellen Ann Fentress, who graduated from Pillow Academy, a segregation academy near Greenwood, think about the many alumni of such schools who surrounded her. Fentress said in an interview that she heard author Kiese Laymon give a talk at a bookstore in Jackson after photos of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s racist 1984 yearbook page surfaced in early 2019. “Laymon said, ‘How come is it when there are these photos of white people in blackface, everybody says, ‘You know, that’s not me’?” she recalled. “He said, ‘You know what I want? I want to see a white person who was in one of these photos say, ‘Yes, this is me, and this is what I was thinking.’ ”
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