Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Walter McAfee (1914-1995) in Ore City, Texas, attended public schools in Marshall, Texas, graduating high school with honors. He enrolled in Wiley College (Texas) where, in 1934, he graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics. In 1937 he earned a Master of Science in Physics from Ohio State University. McAfee earned a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 1949.
During World War II, Walter McAfee was a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corp Engineering Laboratories. There he distinguished himself in electromagnetism and radar. He was a member of the Project Diana team that was responsible for the first lunar radar echo experiments in 1946. The goal of Project Diana was to determine if a high frequency radio signal, could penetrate the outer atmosphere of the earth.
The solution was to send a radar signal to the moon and bounce it back to earth. For this they needed an accurate computation of the velocity of a position on the moon relative to a position on the earth. Dr. McAfee performed the calculations, and on Jan. 10, 1946, the experiment was successfully conducted. Unfortunately, McAfee's contributions to Project Diana (even his name) were not mentioned in news reports about the experiment.
Dr. Walter McAfee was a scientific advisor to the U.S. Arm Electronics Research and Development Command. For 42 years he worked for the government at New Jersey''s Fort Monmouth including service as director of a NATO study on surveillance and target acquisition. He was also a scientific advisor to the U.S. Arm Electronics Research and Development Command. He concurrently lectured in atomic and nuclear physic and solid state electronics at Monmouth College from 1958 to 1975.....Read More
In 1956, President Eisenhower presented McAfee with one of the first Secretary of the Army Research and Study Fellowships, which he used for post-doctoral studies in radio astronomy and ionospherics at Harvard University. With colleagues Felix Lavicka and Ockle Johnson, he analyzed data collected during high altitude nuclear explosions over the Pacific in 1959-60, and they showed for the first time that such explosions could cause communication black-outs. McAfee held a number of research and supervisory positions in the areas of wave propagation, passive sensing, target acquisition, and battlefield surveillance up to his 1985 retirement. He also taught courses in atomic and nuclear physics and in solid state electronics at Monmouth University from 1958 to 1975. He maintained membership in AAS throughout these changing responsibilities and interests......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Lori Lightfoot Becomes the 1st Black Woman and 1st Openly Gay Person Elected to Lead the City of Chicago. The Root: She's the mayor
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In a historic election that saw two black women competing to become mayor of the nation’s third-largest city, voters in Chicago Tuesday night chose Lori Lightfoot to become the first black woman and the first openly gay person to lead the city as its mayor.
Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and relative political newcomer, trounced her opponent, Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and chair of the county’s Democratic Party, by a margin of nearly 50 percentage points, the Washington Post reports.
Lightfoot ran on a campaign of reform and said she would focus on bringing investments to the predominantly black South and West sides of the city, reports the Associated Press.
“We can and we will break this city’s endless cycle of corruption,” Lightfoot said during her victory speech, the Post reports. “And never again, never ever, allow politicians to profit from elected positions.”
After a campaign marked with sharp barbs on both sides, Preckwinkle said she called Lightfoot Tuesday night to congratulate her.
“While I may be disappointed I’m not disheartened. For one thing, this is clearly a historic night,” Preckwinkle told a crowd gathered in her South Side neighborhood, the Post reports. “Not long ago two African American women vying for this position would have been unthinkable. And while it may be true that we took two very different paths to get here, tonight is about the path forward.”
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Things got worse last year, not better. And women of color face the biggest gap. VOX: America has stalled on equal pay
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We often hear that the gender wage gap is closing.
Overall, the pay gap between American women and American men has narrowed significantly since 1980, from about 36 cents to about 15 cents in 2018, according to the Pew Research Center.
But last year, the wage gap actually got slightly bigger. In 2018, women’s earnings were 81.1 percent of men’s, down from 81.8 percent in 2017, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). The drop was especially pronounced for black women, whose earnings went from 67.7 percent of white men’s in 2017 to 65.3 percent in 2018; and Latina women, whose earnings dropped from 62.1 percent to 61.6 percent of white men’s. White women’s earnings dropped from 81.9 percent to 81.5 percent of white men’s.
Those drops aren’t huge, and wage gap numbers always fluctuate a bit from year to year, Ariane Hegewisch, the program director on employment and earnings at the IWPR, told Vox. But they point to something bigger: After relatively swift progress in the 1980s, the wage gap has been stagnating for years. And women of color face especially large disparities. “Progress in terms of closing the gender wage gap is smaller than it has ever been,” Hegewisch said.
Overall, women make about 80 cents for every dollar paid to men. For black and Latina women, the gap is bigger.
It’s hard to know the exact reason behind the widening gaps for black and Latina women in 2018. But the salary picture in different sectors of the economy may play a role, Hegewisch said. The country has seen growth in service jobs like domestic work, where black and Latina women are overrepresented. Those jobs tend to pay a low wage, which may account for some of the growing gap.
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When the Jordanian army went shopping for land in northern Sudan in late 1999, its scouts came across what appeared to be a food-growing paradise. The terrain was vast, flat, and fat with nutrients. The water it could draw from the nearby Nile was almost embarrassingly bountiful. And local officials were bending over backward to offer favorable financial terms. It all seemed like a can’t-miss opportunity to supplement Jordan’s national food supply while turning a tidy profit. The military pension fund snapped up 9,000 acres of backcountry scrub three hours’ drive north of Khartoum, and the farmhands got to work.
Soon afterward, as news of potential riches spread, the surrounding land began filling up. A Pakistani company leased a large plot to the south. Syrians began farming to the north. Emiratis, Lebanese, Yemenis, and others acquired 100,000-plus acres apiece. The main north-south highway that runs alongside Al-Bashaer, the Jordanian farm, grew clogged with tractor-trailers carrying hay bales that would become fodder across the Red Sea. “There’s good soil, enough water, sunshine, everything you need to grow a lot of crops,” says Abdelazim al-Jak, a Khartoum native who now manages the farm. “It shouldn’t be a surprise that everyone wants it.”
The mad dash has only accelerated in recent years, as Sudanese authorities, desperate for revenue, have resurrected the country’s long-standing dream of becoming an agricultural superpower. Since losing access to most of the country’s oil revenue with the secession of South Sudan in 2011, they’ve been trying to parcel out land to cash-rich, food-poor investors. In 2016 the Saudi government leased 1 million arable acres in the east of the country. Not long after, Bahrain leased 100,000 acres, a plot almost as large as Bahrain itself.
By the time villages across Sudan’s River Nile and Northern states had awoken to the full scale of foreign land acquisitions, even nonfood producers such as Jordan’s Sayegh Group, the Middle East’s biggest paint producer, were muscling in. “You could walk hundreds of kilometers without stepping on Sudanese-owned land,” says Khaled Khairallah, a livestock herder in Wad al-Habashi, a village to the south and across the river from Al-Bashaer. “What is left for us?”
Arab policymakers have been touting Sudan’s ability to feed the populous and water-scarce Middle East since the 1970s. The country features as much as 200 million acres of arable land, a strategic location less than a day’s sail across the Red Sea to the Saudi port of Jeddah, and a roughly 25 percent share of the Nile’s waters under regional agreements, much of it unused. In the Middle East and North Africa, by contrast, World Bank and United Nations statistics show that the number of chronically undernourished people has doubled, to 33 million, since 1990, and that water availability has tumbled on average to a sixth of the global mean. “We have vast resources, and they have vast need,” said Mubarak al-Fadil, Sudan’s former minister of investment and deputy prime minister, when we spoke in August. (He resigned in January.) “We just need their finance and expertise.”
The benefits for both parties would seem obvious. And yet little of the 5 million acres the agriculture ministry estimates are in foreign hands—perhaps less than 1 in 20 acres—has been cultivated. “Nothing’s happened! Really almost nothing’s happened,” says Osama Daoud Abdellatif, chairman of the Dal Group, the country’s largest conglomerate. “Someone got this land, and someone got that land. But few have done much.”
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After racist incidents at schools in Charlottesville and the Bronx, students have taken action to make school officials address deeper inequities.
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Since the civil rights movement, student protests have been a powerful driver of social change. More than 60 years later, students of color are continuing to call attention to racial injustice and inequity, fueling a growing youth movement against racism.
Alongside the Movement for Black Lives and college anti-racism movements like the 2015 University of Missouri protests, middle school and high school students in the US have become increasingly vocal about issues like police brutality, gun violence, school closings in communities of color, and racist incidents in their schools.
The latest of these protests came in March, when scandals over a racist video at a private school in New York, and online threats of violence against black and Hispanic students in Charlottesville, Virginia, drew strong reactions from students. These incidents also sparked protests that called attention to the connection between racist incidents on campus and larger patterns of racism and bias in American society.
“There cannot be any type of reconciliation without the redistribution of resources for black and brown students,” Zyahna Bryant, a community organizer, high school senior, and president of the Black Student Union at Charlottesville High School, told the Washington Post on March 25, days after a teenager had threatened an “ethnic cleansing” at the school.
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How a Well-Funded System of Voter Suppression Doesn’t Bode Well for Black Folk or Democracy. The Root: Rigged
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You know how the extrajudicial killings of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Philando Castile moved so many of us to action—whether it was creating art, taking to the streets, or being more involved civically? Right. Well, there was another turning point in American history that spurned some to action as well, even though to most, that “incident” was a good thing, a beautiful thing, even.
The 2008 presidential election of Barack Hussein Obama struck fear into the hearts of small men, and, according to a new film, Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook, supercharged efforts to make it that much harder for those who elected Obama to vote, ostensibly ensuring that something like that never happened again.
“Basically, Obama won with 25 percent of his plurality coming from younger and nonwhite voters,” Tim Smith, co-executive producer of Rigged, told The Root. “With the growing demographic of nonwhite voters in America, I think in five years, more whites will be dying than are being born, and traditionally whites have voted for Republicans. And so [the GOP] basically had two choices in 2008: the first was to appeal to a larger demographic on social issues and legislation, and the other was to keep them from voting in large numbers. They obviously chose the latter, which is what our film is all about.”
Narrated by outspoken actor Jeffrey Wright, Rigged follows the recent trajectory of voter suppression in the United States, and outlines a voter suppression playbook, which outlines at least 10 ways certain players are putting forth a concerted, well-funded effort to disenfranchise voters and maintain power— from purging voter rolls, to Voter ID laws, to “cracking and packing” congressional districts to consolidate power for one group or break up power for another.
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The slain rapper, who was known for his investment in his Los Angeles community, also inspired fans and fellow musicians who share his East African heritage. The Atlantic: Nipsey Hussle’s Eritrean American Dream
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In April 2018, the Los Angeles–born street rapper Nipsey Hussle traveled to his father’s native Eritrea for the first time in 14 years. The trip found the musician, née Ermias Davidson Asghedom, both contemplative and triumphant: After a prolific run of mixtapes spanning more than a decade, the fiercely independent artist had recently released his major-label studio debut, Victory Lap. (The February 2018 record, which debuted at No. 4, would later earn him a nomination for Best Rap Album at this year’s Grammys.)
While in the East African country, Hussle and his brother, Samiel “Blacc Sam” Asghedom, followed their father’s lead: They traveled to historical sites and met the country’s divisive president; they were blessed by their 90-year-old grandmother with himbasha, the slightly sweet bread most often served during celebrations. Hussle was also interviewed by a number of state-run mediaoutlets. In one interview, which was posted to Eritrea’s Ministry of Informationwebsite, the Eritrean journalist Billion Temesghen told the musician that his listeners, particularly those on the continent, saw his hard-won successes as their own. Hussle’s response at the time was gracious and affirming. “I want to thank my Eritrean fans for feeling connected to me and for supporting me. I feel extremely grateful,” he replied. “I am going to keep coming back here and make frequent returns … Thank you for keeping my name alive out here.”
But now, less than a year later, Hussle’s connection to his fans, Eritrean and American alike, has taken on a far more tragic valence. On Sunday afternoon, Hussle was fatally shot outside the store he co-owned in South L.A., the neighborhood Hussle celebrated in his music, advocacy, and philanthropic ventures. The Los Angeles Police Department has since apprehended a suspect in the case, but the rapper and activist’s killing remains a devastating blow to his family and to fans around the world, many of whom have likened him to the late Tupac Shakur.
The news of Hussle’s death spread quickly, especially among the rapper’s supporters—that day, an impromptu vigil was held outside the Asghedom brothers’ store, The Marathon Clothing. Local fans and friends lined the corner of Victoria Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard, playing Hussle’s music and reflecting on a man who “poured positivity into the streets,” as one attendee told the Los Angeles Times. Within 24 hours, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook users had begun sharing flyers for candlelight vigils organized in cities around the country, including Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and Dallas.
Many of the memorials were organized specifically by Eritrean diasporic communities, their ad hoc appearances a direct reflection of the rapper’s importance to those who share his heritage. Among the first gatherings announced after the rally in Los Angeles was a vigil to be held Thursday in Washington, D.C., which boasts one of the largest East African populations in the United States.
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