Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Jewel Plummer Cobb was an American biologist, cancer researcher, professor, dean, and academic administrator. She contributed to the field of cancer research by studying the cure for melanoma. Cobb was an advocate for increasing the representation of women and students of color in universities, and she created programs to support students interested in pursuing graduate school.
Jewel Plummer Cobb was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 17, 1924, and spent her childhood as an only child. She is from the third generation of the Plummer family who sought a career in medical science. Her grandfather, a freed slave, graduated from Howard University in 1898 and became a pharmacist. Her father, Frank V. Plummer, became a physician after he graduated from Cornell University, where he helped found the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. Her mother, Carriebel (Cole) Plummer, taught dance and was a physical education teacher.
Becoming a noted cell biologist was a difficult road for Cobb, because she faced segregation during the course of her education. Although she came from an upper-middle-class background, Cobb found that she had to go to underfunded black Chicago public schools. But Cobb was in constant contact with African American professionals and was well aware of their accomplishments. She decided not to let anything stand in the way of her own success.
Supplementing her education with books from her father's library, Cobb had access to scientific journals and magazines, current event periodicals, and materials on successful African Americans. Although Cobb was at first interested in becoming a physical education teacher like her mother and aunt, she found that she was interested in biology when, in her sophomore year in high school, she studied cells through a microscope. An honors student, Cobb showed academic promise. She had a solid education and a drive to learn.
Although her interest in biology could have led her to become a medical doctor, Cobb was not interested in working directly with the sick. She was, nonetheless, interested in the theory of disease, an interest that later led her to become one of the leading cancer researchers in the United States.
When it came time to enroll in college, Cobb selected the University of Michigan. Due to the segregation of the dormitories at the university at that time, all African Americans, regardless of their year of study, were forced to live in one house. In disgust at the racism found there, Cobb left the University of Michigan after three semesters and earned her B.A. in biology from the historically black Talladega College in Alabama.
Cobb applied for a teaching fellowship at New York University. Because of her race, she was at first turned down for the position. Cobb refused to accept the rejection and personally visited the college, which then accepted her because her credentials were so impressive. In 1945, Cobb started her career in teaching as a fellow there. In 1947, she earned an M.S. in cell physiology and in 1950 she earned a Ph.D. in cell physiology from New York University. Her dissertation was titled "Mechanisms of Pigment Formation."
Cobb was named an independent investigator for the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1949. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cancer Research Foundation of Harlem Hospital and at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Attracted by theoretical approaches to biology, Cobb entered the field of research. Understanding the processes of living cells was at the heart of her studies. In particular, she found that tissue cultures were an interesting area of research. Determining which cells grew outside the body led to her study with Dorothy Walker Jones that looked at how human cancer cells were affected by drugs....Read more here.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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No generation has undergone such meticulous examination in recent years as the millennials. Yet our understanding of them contains a glaring gap. The New Republic: The Missing Black Millennial
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As a generation, millennials are used to being misunderstood. Perhaps no generation has been so gleefully maligned in the press, which has produced a zillion think pieces casting millennials as entitled, lazy, mayonnaise-hating, over-educated pampered whiners who, in their blinkered narcissism, are selling out the human race. That caricature has slowly given way to a more nuanced picture of a generation profoundly shaped by the events of its time—9/11, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, climate change—and baleful socioeconomic trends: growing income inequality, staggering levels of student debt, stagnant wages. And yet, for all this new understanding, there remains a huge blind spot when it comes to black millennials in particular.
African-Americans make up 14 percent of the millennial population, born, roughly speaking, between 1981 and 1996. Black millennials came of age in the so-called post-race era, their worldview defined by Barack Obama’s historic rise to the presidency, Beyonce’s dominance of the entertainment industry, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s emergence as one of the premier public intellectuals in this country. But they also witnessed tragedies like the Rodney King beating, Hurricane Katrina, and the police shootings of Mike Brown and so many other young black men and women. They saw the horrific and racist treatment of our first black president and his wife. And then they saw the alleged “post-race” period give way to the election of the most openly racist president in modern American history.
The black millennial, then, is composed of contradictions and ambiguity; her journey of tentative steps forward and horrific setbacks. In this, young blacks are not so different from their ancestors, complicating the whole notion of generational change that we are used to ascribing to non-black people, in which a particular cohort is perceived as being fundamentally different from its predecessors. In many ways, the story of the black millennial is as much about consistency as it is about change—which is to say that the story of the black millennial is the story of what it means to be black, period.
Like all millennials, black millennials have to deal with a host of economic challenges. In addition to middling wages and the burden of student debt, they have to negotiate a thriving gig economy that provides little security and an urban housing market that has increasingly priced out the working and middle classes. They are uncertain about the future in a way that past generations weren’t, and grasping for an adulthood that feels forever delayed.
But though black millennials have much in common with their white peers, there are important distinctions. In almost all areas of life, the deck is stacked even higher against us, in part due to historical discrimination and in part because of inequities unique to the millennial era. By many measures, black millennials are behind. We lag in terms of employment, wages, and attaining “good jobs.” We have less wealth, live in poverty more. Even when we try to do something positive like go to college, we have to take on higher amounts of student debt. And then we still end up with fewer job prospects than our white counterparts.
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It was Aretha Franklin who made Don Cornelius realise he had hit the big time. Just two years earlier, the impresario’s show Soul Train had been a Chicago thing, broadcasting local talent to local viewers. Now it was a national sensation and even the choosiest stars wanted to get on board. Franklin told him: “My kids love the show and I want to be a part of it.” Stevie Wonder improvised an ode to Soul Train. James Brown, convinced that somebody, probably a white somebody, must be behind such a slick operation, looked around its Los Angeles studio and kept asking Cornelius: “Brother, who’s backing you on this?” Each time Cornelius replied: “Well, James, it’s just me.”
He wasn’t bragging. As the host (or “conductor”) of Soul Train from 1970 to 1993, Cornelius was an avatar of cool, with his glorious afro, wide-lapelled suits and avuncular baritone, signing off each episode with a funky benediction: “I’m Don Cornelius, and as always in parting, we wish you love, peace ... and soul!” Billed as “the hippest trip in America”, Soul Train didn’t just beam the latest sounds from black America into millions of homes, but – with amateur dancers who became as integral to the show as the performers – the fashions, hairstyles and dance moves too.
“Most US music shows had been conservative when it came to race and representation,” says academic Jack Hamilton. “Soul Train was groundbreaking by having so many black people onscreen.”
The genesis of Soul Train is brought to life in the new US TV drama American Soul. “What I learned was there was Don Cornelius the host, and DC the man,” says Sinqua Walls, who plays Cornelius. “The only image we got of Don was the cool guy on Soul Train. On American Soul, we’re going to unpack the man who created all of that.”
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You don’t need a doctorate in mathematics to understand the numbers and bias behind Black mathematicians’ near-invisibility in their own discipline. The New York Times notes that only 1 percent of all math Ph.D.s granted in the last decade went to Black scholars. The outlet profiled one such mathematician, Edray Goins, and his fight against the math world’s White normative culture yesterday.
The article chronicles the South Los Angeles native’s path and his ongoing mission to bring more underrepresented groups of color into math. The Times highlights a 2017 essay he wrote for the American Mathematical Society that explains why he left a tenured faculty spot in Purdue University’s well-known and research-heavy math department for another job at the much smaller, undergraduate education-focused Pomona College. Goins, who is president of the National Association of Mathematicians, partially attributes the decision to his isolation and required additional labor:
I am an African-American male. I have been the only one in most of the universities [that I’ve] been to—the only student or faculty in the mathematics department. In fact for a while at my current Research I University, I was only one of two African-American faculty in the entire College of Science—which houses seven departments for 300 faculty and staff serving nearly 3,000 students.
Allow me to put this into perspective. African Americans make up roughly 12 percent of the general population. This means, on average, one out of every eight people you pass on the street will be African American. In my College of Science, that average drops to one out of every 100 faculty you meet on our campus. To say that I feel isolated is an understatement.
I have been willing to work with my university on bringing more underrepresented minority faculty to visit campus to give talks (especially through my speaker series in 2011, 2012, and 2013) and bringing more underrepresented minority students to conduct research (especially through my REU). But it gets very tiring. Very Tiring. Especially when you’re still trying to work with your own postdocs, graduate students and research projects.
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Gov. Roy Cooper named Associate Justice Cheri Beasley chief justice of the state’s highest court on Tuesday. Beasley’s appointment is historic as she will become the first Black woman in North Carolina’s history to hold that title.
“It is not lost on me — this historic fact — especially since this is Black History Month,” Beasley said at a Feb. 12 news conference. “I know that the work we do is hugely important, but the other thing I think about are the little girls along the way, who ought to have a sense of promise and hope for their futures, and so I hope that in some way my service inspires young people especially, but really I hope it is a show of symbolism for where we are in North Carolina.”
Beasley is replacing Chief Justice Mark Martin, who is stepping down from the position on Feb. 28 to serve as dean of the Regent University School of Law in Virginia. She spent seven years as an associate judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals and served as a district court judge, per the Atlanta Black Star.
State Republicans blasted the Democratic governor’s decision to appoint Beasley, saying that it was “purely politics.”
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As a child Widline Pyrame grew up in Haiti hating her kinky hair so much that she burned her scalp and went bald accidentally after using chemical relaxers to straighten the frizz, which eventually led to her hair falling out.
So now, the 30-year-old wants African American girls to love their luscious locs as much as she does now and created a line of dolls with afros as an ode to inspire Black girls to foster a love for their curly crowns, The Daily Mail reports.
“I struggled with my self-esteem and confidence as a child,” said Pyrame who grew up in Haiti but moved to Boston in 2002.
“I thought I wasn’t beautiful enough because of my dark skin and hair texture, which led me to want straight hair so badly — just like they did in the magazines — so I looked more like the dolls, with sleek locks.
“I used my mother’s products all over my hair, hoping that it would be silky smooth. Instead it all fell out, and she was furious!”
It takes a village and it was Pyrame’s uncle who bought her and her sister Youselord a Black doll to share that helped her realize the beauty that was within herself.
She added: “One day my uncle got us a Black doll to share. We were so shocked to see that one existed that we just stared at her in amazement.”
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