Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, Inventors, and Pioneers
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Ernest Everett Just (August 14, 1883 – October 27, 1941) was a pioneering African American biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. In his work within marine biology, cytology and parthenogenesis, he advocated the study of whole cells under normal conditions, rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting.
Just was born in South Carolina to Charles Frazier Just Jr. and Mary Matthews Just on 14 August 1883. His father and grandfather, Charles Sr., were dock builders. When Ernest was four years old, both his father and grandfather died. Just’s mother became the sole supporter of him, his younger brother, and his younger sister. Mary Matthews Just taught at an African American school in Charleston to support her family. During the summer, she worked in the phosphate mines on James Island. Noticing that there was much vacant land near the island, Mary persuaded several black families to move there to farm. The town they founded, now incorporated in the West Ashley area of Charleston, was eventually named Maryville in her honor.
Hoping Just would become a teacher, his mother sent him to an all-black boarding school in Orangeburg, South Carolina at the age of thirteen. Believing that schools for blacks in the south were inferior, Just and his mother thought it better for him to go north. At the age of sixteen, Just enrolled at a Meriden, New Hampshire college-preparatory high school, Kimball Union Academy. Tragedy struck during Just's second year at Kimball when his mother died. Despite this hardship, Just completed the four-year program in only three years, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in 1903 with the highest grades in his class.
Just went on to graduate magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Just won special honors in zoology, and distinguished himself in botany, history, and sociology as well. He was also honored as a Rufus Choate scholar for two years.
When he graduated from Dartmouth, Just faced the same problems as all black college graduates of his time: no matter how brilliant they were or how high were their grades, it was almost impossible for blacks to become faculty members of white colleges or universities. Just then took what seemed to be the best choices available to him and was appointed to a teaching position at historically-black Howard University in Washington, D.C.. In 1910, he was put in charge of the newly-formed biology department by Wilbur P. Thirkield. In 1912, he became head of the Department of Zoology, a position he held until his death in 1941. Just was soon introduced to Dr. Frank R. Lillie, head of the biology department at the University of Chicago. Lillie, who was also chief of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, invited Just to spend the summer of 1909 as his research assistant at the MBL. For the next 20 years, Just spent every summer but one at MBL. On June 12, 1912 Ernest married Ethel Highwarden, who taught German at Howard University. They had three children: Margaret, Highwarden, and Maribel.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The Joe Biden administration has the ambitious goal to create a carbon pollution free power sector by 2035. To get there, communities will have to explore all kinds of carbon-free and renewable energy. One of them is deep below the surface of the Earth: geothermal.
In Chicago, a neighborhood has launched a community effort to see if geothermal is right for it, and residents are looking at taking advantage of the city’s trademark alleys to make it happen.
Naomi Davis is the head of the environmental justice group Blacks in Green, based in Chicago. At a community meeting she pitched geothermal energy — power drawn from underground that can heat and cool homes. The hope is that it could make life easier for residents in West Woodlawn, a historically Black neighborhood on the city’s South Side.
The undertaking, Davis said, could lower utility bills, bring green jobs and cut pollution.
“We’re about the business of energy justice,” said Davis. “Which means that we have a campaign to end energy poverty, and we’re not playing.”
Blacks in Green is one of many community partners across the country that was given a grant by the U.S. Department of Energy to design a geothermal pilot program. The task is to create a shared geothermal district networked across four city blocks. It would include more than 150 residential buildings.
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Skylar Brandon was only 18 months old when she first laid eyes on her “bestie,” Charlene. She’d gone to a rodeo in Oakland, California, with her grandmother, says Skylar’s mom, Shannon Williams-Brandon. “Apparently, Skylar was so star-struck by this white horse named Charlene. My mom told me she just gravitated towards this horse.”
When Skylar’s grandmother offered to pay for riding lessons, Skylar met the 1,200-pound Peruvian mare up close. She and Charlene have been inseparable since.
Now 6, Skylar has won two peewee barrel races riding at the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo (BPIR), the only Black-owned traveling rodeo association, though she doesn’t seem to care about the hundreds of dollars she’s earned in prizes. When asked to describe her favorite thing about racing, Skylar’s answer is clear: “Going fast.”
For Valeria Howard-Cunningham, president of the BPIR, stories like Skylar’s are why it exists. “I love seeing the young kids get into rodeo,” says Howard-Cunningham. “I can see the excitement in their faces when they compete—and the friendships they’re making with other cowboys and cowgirls. Our rodeo is about developing that next generation.”
BPIR was founded in 1984 by event promoter Lu Vason, Howard-Cunningham’s late husband. Known for working with musical groups such as the Pointer Sisters and the Whispers, Vason got the idea for an all-Black rodeo when he attended Cheyenne Frontier Days, the world’s largest outdoor rodeo. He was shocked at the dearth of Black riders and viewers.
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Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Ala., is the Equal Justice Initiative's third site focused on America's history of slavery, racism and discriminatory policing. It opens March 27. The Grio: Sculpture park provides unflinching look at faces and lives of enslaved Americans
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Visitors to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park wind a serpentine path past art pieces depicting the lives of enslaved people in America and historic exhibits, including two cabins where the enslaved lived, before arriving at a towering monument.
Stretching nearly four stories into the sky, the National Monument to Freedom honors the millions of people who endured the brutality of slavery. The monument is inscribed with 122,000 surnames that formerly enslaved people chose for themselves, as documented in the 1870 Census, after being emancipated at the Civil War’s end.
The sculpture park is the third site created by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., which is dedicated to taking an unflinching look at the country’s history of slavery, racism and discriminatory policing. The first two sites — the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a memorial to people slain in racial terror killings; and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration — opened in 2018.
The sculpture park, which opens March 27, weaves art installations, historic artifacts and personal narratives to explore the history of slavery in America and honor the millions of people who endured its brutality.
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Conservatives have not limited their attack on reproductive rights to the United States. They’ve been busy imposing their will on other countries, too—with disastrous consequences for millions of poor women. The New Republic: The Terrifying Global Reach of the American Anti-Abortion Movement
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Because Editar Ochieng knew the three young men, she didn’t think twice when they beckoned her into a house in an isolated area near the Nairobi River. One was like a brother; the other two were her neighbors in the sprawling Kenyan slum of Kibera.
Ochieng did not know the woman who performed her abortion. She and a friend scoured Nairobi until they found her, an untrained practitioner who worked in the secrecy of her home and charged a fraction of what a medical professional would. Mostly, what Ochieng remembers is the agony when this stranger inserted something into her vagina and “pierced” her womb. “It was really very painful. Really, really, really painful,” she told me. Afterward, Ochieng said, she cut up her mattress to use in place of sanitary pads, which she could not afford. She was 16 years old.
As traumatic as her experience was, Ochieng was more fortunate than many women in Kenya, which bans most abortions. She, at least, survived.
Like Ochieng, most Kenyan women facing unwanted pregnancies have no good choices. They live in a culture that gives women little agency over their bodies; they experience high levels of poverty—two-thirds of residents live on less than $3.20 a day—and they must contend with conflicts between abortion laws codified in the country’s 2010 constitution and an older, harsher penal code that remains on the books. Because the penal code criminalizes abortion, relatively few women are able to obtain the procedure legally, and then only if a health professional determines that their life or health is in danger or, technically, if their pregnancy was the result of rape. That final exception dates only to 2019—13 years after Ochieng’s three acquaintances raped her—and is rarely applied.
Despite the prohibitions, more than half a million Kenyan women have abortions every year. The small percentage with means might find a trained professional willing to perform a clandestine, but safe, abortion. All too often, women gamble on risky methods reminiscent of the coat-hanger days of pre–Roe v. Wade America. They insert knitting needles into their vaginas and ingest dangerous chemicals, abortion rights advocates in the country say. They turn to unskilled providers, who scrape their uteruses with wires, give them concoctions intended for animals, or tell them to ingest concentrated soap, said Nelly Munyasia, executive director of Reproductive Health Network Kenya, which represents nearly 600 private health care providers. The national hospital in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital and largest city, has an entire ward dedicated primarily to women suffering from the complications of botched abortions, the advocates said. (Post-abortion care is legal.)
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It is a crowded field of 18 in the battle for Senegal's top job, but two men - recently freed opposition politician Bassirou Diomaye Faye and the ruling party's heir apparent Amadou Ba - look most likely to win over voters in Sunday's presidential election.
Their rivalry underpins a massive divide and clash of outlook in the country, usually regarded as a beacon of democracy in West Africa, especially over its relationship with France, the former colonial power.
The poll is a rushed job - the date was announced with less than three weeks' notice, following a month of confusion and violent protests.
What seems to unite most Senegalese is the anger directed at outgoing President Macky Sall who tried to postpone the election - originally scheduled for 25 February - until December.
Mr Sall has told the BBC he acted to protect the integrity of the vote after allegations of corruption and disputes over the eligibility of some presidential candidates.
However, critics accused him of seeking to extend his term in office or stop the clock to better prepare his candidate - which he denies.
It led to political turmoil, the intervention of the Constitutional Court, the president agreeing to leave office next month when his term officially ends, and a new election date.
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As intrigue mounted last week over a then-missing, now recently appeared Kate Middleton and her Photoshopped picture, British-owned tabloids directed their ire toward a familiar target: Meghan Markle.
To an unpracticed observer, it would be difficult to blame the disappearance of Princess Kate from the public eye on her sister-in-law, but the tabloids are nothing if not resourceful. Page Six reported that Prince Harry and Meghan’s inner circle were mocking Kate’s botched Photoshop and sneering that Meghan would never have made such a mistake. Meanwhile, Meghan and Harry, alleged the Daily Mail, were nothing but a pair of hypocrites. They had used Photoshop on their own pregnancy announcement pictures, and so had no leg to stand on when it came to criticizing Kensington Palace for Photoshopping Kate’s Mother’s Day/proof-of-life picture.
Harry and Meghan swiftly went on the defensive and denied it all. The only alteration they had made to their photo was to render it in black-and-white, they announced, and they never said Meghan wouldn’t have made that kind of mistake. (Though let’s be real: with the amount of time Meghan spends curating her Instagram? She wouldn’t have.) The couple has otherwise declined to comment on the controversy, which is probably wise. There’s little chance of a win for them in getting themselves involved.
In a sense, though, they always were involved. The story of Kate’s disappearance took off to begin with because very online fans of Meghan sat up and took notice. As royals reporter Ellie Hall laid out in Nieman Lab at the beginning of March, early conversation about Kate’s disappearance from the public scene was driven by pro-Meghan and Harry accounts in the royal-watcher internet communities where royal haters and fans alike watch and discuss the movements of the royal family with avid fascination.
“It’s one of the points that keeps coming up in the online discourse — the apparent hypocrisy between the palace and the UK media’s treatment of each woman,” Hall explained. “People are comparing the hands-off, privacy-first stance that the press is taking toward Kate with their attitude toward Meghan and the stories that were written about her while she was on maternity leave. ... There’s also a definite feeling among some people that Kate should have to go through this social media and press speculation because Meghan went through it, it was worse for Meghan, and when she complained, people told her to suck it up.”
Meghan is part of the story of Kate’s disappearance because Meghan and Kate have been treated as each other’s opposites and foils ever since Meghan and Harry first got engaged. Their shifting treatments at the hands of the monarchy and the press has come to symbolize the question of what Britain’s values and priorities should be. Kate and Meghan themselves have come to symbolize different ways of being women, different ways of being royal, different ways of being famous — and, most fraught of all, different ways of responding to the problem of what happened to their husbands’ mother, Princess Diana.
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Graham was the plaintiff in the 2010 landmark Supreme Court decision that found that sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole for nonhomicide offenses constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the 8th Amendment. It was one of a series of Supreme Court decisions that reflected an evolving understanding by courts that kids are different.
In 2002, when Graham was 16, he was charged with armed burglary as an adult after he and two other teenagers robbed a Jacksonville restaurant. The charge carried a possible life sentence, but he took a plea deal and was given credit for time served in county jail and put on probation. Six months later, just a month short of his 18th birthday, he committed a home invasion.
At his 2006 sentencing hearing for that crime, a Florida judge told the then 19-year-old that he had squandered his second chance: “It is apparent to the Court that you have decided that this is the way you are going to live your life and that the only thing I can do now is to try and protect the community from your actions.”
The judge could have given him five years, but instead sentenced Graham to the maximum: life without the possibility of parole.
Eight years later his case would be in front of the Supreme Court on appeal. The justices would find that sentence unconstitutional, noting that “it does not follow that [Graham] would be a risk to society for the rest of his life.”
The majority opinion noted that at the time, there were 129 juveniles convicted of nonhomicides who were serving sentences of life without parole across the country, a significant majority of whom (77) were serving sentences in Florida.
Following the Supreme Court decision, in 2012 Graham’s original judge in Florida resentenced him to 25 years in prison—the maximum sentence allowed.
Over his 20-year incarceration, Graham earned his GED, took college classes, and found solace in his faith. He’s passionate about family, sports, and prison reform. He also co-founded Plead the 8th, a nonprofit working to end the incarceration of children in Florida’s adult system.
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