Official Black History Month Thread (2015)

[Idaeo]

The Ralph Bunche School is listed on the National Historic Register of Places for its place within the events of state and local importance that fit into the broad patterns of national history. The school building is a result of one part of the long battle leading to Brown v. The Board of Education decision that ended educational segregation. The direct result of Margaret Smith et al v. School Board of King George County VA et al, Richmond Civil Action No. 631, the school was built as a result of one of the first cases in Virginia challenging the equality of the educational opportunities offered to African American citizens in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The case was part of the National Association of Colored Peoples (NAACP) strategy to end segregation.
In 1948, a small rural county in Virginia found itself embroiled in what would become a nationwide debate over the enforcement of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal”​

doctrine in education. King George County is located in northeastern Virginia. In 1938, King George County inaugurated a new High School for its white students. The school boasted the modern amenities of a modern kitchen and cafeteria, a modern library, a modern and well equipped laboratory, indoor plumbing and a central heating plant. The King George Training​

School, which was the county public school for its African American children, did not have these amenities. The High School was accredited. The Training School was not. The Richmond
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in association with the Richmond law group of Hill, Martin and Robinson brought suit against the​

King George County School Board in the name of the children involved. At issue was the equality of the physical plants, the equality of the academic coursework provided, and teacher
pay. The NAACP also filed suits in two other Virginia counties at the same time, in Gloucester and Surrey Counties




My parents went to this school and my grandparents testified in the Richmond case to integrate the schools.


I remember my dad telling me some cacs broke into the school while he went there and destroyed all their band instruments.

 

[Easy-E]

Brehs, read this.

I have 50 pgs to go and I love it.

From the time he proposed to Lilian Gregory to when she had the baby to the next Christmas

 

[Deadpool1986]

Little Known Black History Fact: George Washington and Slavery

This past President’s Day, which granted many in America time off, honors the nation’s first president, George Washington. Washington’s legacy in the annals of history are well known, but it appears he used political trickery to keep slaves at work and in bondage despite laws stating otherwise.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, University of Delaware associate professor of Black Studies and History Erica Armstrong Dunbar found in her research that the Washington family maintained slavery throughout their lifetime. Although many states in the North were slowly distancing themselves from slave ownership, the Washingtons maintained it as a means to maintain wealth and power.

Dr. Dunbar explained that after Washington ascended to the presidency in 1789, he continued to own slaves. In Washington’s later years, he attempted to distance himself from the horrendous practice but it appears to have been all for show. During Washington’s presidency, the family lived between New York, Pennsylvania, and Mount Vernon in Northern Virginia.

In 1780, a Pennsylvania law partly did away with slavery. Every six months, Washington’s wife would travel to Mount Vernon with their human property to avoid the application of the law. In 1793, Washington signed a fugitive slave act into law that would offered protection to slave owners and targeted those who would harbor and help slaves go free.

One of Washington’s slaves, Ona Judge ran away from the Washington estate because she learned that Mrs. Washington intended to give her away as a wedding gift to her granddaughter, a common practice of the time. Judge made it to Portsmouth, N.H. and married a free man.

The couple had three children but all were in danger because Judge remained a wanted woman. For three years, Washington’s men attempted to track down Judge to no avail. Three months before Washington’s death in December 1799, the pursuit for Judge was still in motion.

When Washington died, over 300 slaves lived on the Mount Vernon estate, half of them belonging to the late president. According to a will, the slaves were supposed to be freed after his death. But after Washington’s wife inherited the slaves, they remained in bondage.
http://blackamericaweb.com/2015/02/...history-fact-george-washington-and-slavery/2/

 

[loyola llothta]

S/o to the brother thats building

 

[loyola llothta]

Black inventors

Marie Van Brittan Brown - Was an African-American nurse and inventor who invented the security system. Born on October 30, 1922 , in Jamaica, Queens, New York City. An African-American inventor, who in 1966 had the idea for a home surveillance device. Marie Brown applied for a patent along with Albert Brown in 1966 for a closed circuit television security system. She and her husband, Albert, created a system for a motorized camera to show images on a monitor, at the time a surveillance device of this type seemed almost unthinkable.

Marie was tired of the slow response times of police in her neighborhood and wanted to find a way for people to keep safe. Together they completely revolutionize home security

circuit television security system - the forerunner to the modern home security system. Brown’s system had a set of four peep holes and a camera that could slide up and down to look out each one. Anything the camera picked up would appear on a monitor. An additional feature of Brown’s invention was that a person also could unlock a door with a remote control.She was given an Award for the National Scientists Comittee (NSC)

A female black inventor far ahead of her time, Marie Van Brittan Brown created an invention that was the first in a long string of home-security inventions that continue to flood the market today.

 

[loyola llothta]

Black Inventor

Philip Emeagwali - (born in 1954) is a Nigerian-born engineer, mathematician, computer scientist and geologist who was one of two winners of the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, a prize from the IEEE, for his use of a Connection Machine supercomputer to help detect petroleum fields. Emeagwali took knowledge gained from his study of nature and bees and applied the efficiency of their honeycomb structure to create powerful computer processing. Using this construction, in 1989, the used 65,000 processors to build the world’s fastest computer, one that performs computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second.

Emeagwali was born in Akure, Nigeria on 23 August 1954. His early schooling was suspended in 1967 as a result of the Nigerian Civil War. At 14 years, he served in the Biafran army. After the war he completed high-school equivalency through self-study. He traveled to the United States to study under a scholarship following completion of a correspondence course at the University of London. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oregon State University in 1977. During this time, he worked as a civil engineer at the Bureau of Land Reclamation in Wyoming. He later moved to Washington DC, receiving in 1986 a master’s degree from George Washington University in ocean and marine engineering, and a second master’s in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland.

Emeagwali received a $1,000 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, based on an application of the CM-2 massively-parallel computer for computational fluid dynamics (oil-reservoir modeling). He won in the “price/performance” category, with a performance figure of 400 Mflops/$1M, corresponding to an absolute performance of 3.1 Gflops. The other recipient of the award, who won in the “peak performance” category for a similar application of the CM-2 to oil-related seismic data processing, actually had a price-performance figure of 500 Mflops/$1M (superior to what Emeagwali had achieved) and an absolute performance of 6.0 Gflops, but the judges decided not to award both prizes to the same team. Emeagwali’s simulation was the first program to apply a pseudo-time approach to reservoir modeling.

 

[loyola llothta]

Black Inventor

Dr. Thomas Mensah -

was born in 1950 in Kumasi, Ghana and attended Wesley College Practice school from where he went on to attend Adisadel College in Cape Coast, one of the highest-performing boys high schools in Ghana. Dr. Thomas Mensah is an internationally recognized authority in Fiber Optics and Nanotechnology and also a renowned scientist and inventor with 7 USA and worldwide patents in Fiber Optics over a period of six years. He has at least 14 patents to his name in general.

He is the first black person to receive such number of patents in a short number of years, and was elected to the rank of Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in the USA.One of his patents based on boundary layer theory led to the replacement of Nitrogen inert gas with the more soluble carbon dioxide gas permitting optical fibres to be coated at ultra-high speed beyond 50 meters per second producing high strength fibres used for submarine and undersea cables that connect continents and countries, leading to a global infrastructure for the modern day high speed internet.In one of his patents he used his understanding of boundary layer theory to design a high speed draw and coating manufacturing system that eliminated bubbles and defects in optical fibers.

Fiber Optics is one of the greatest innovations in this century, since the internet depends on it. Over one billion people today are connected to the Internet because of fiber optics. All emails, YouTube videos, Tweets and Facebook pictures are transmitted by lasers on fiber optics networks; both terrestrial and submarine platforms to cell phones, tablets and personal computers world wide.As a leading Fiber Optics innovator, Dr. Mensah worked at both Corning Glass Works Inc, and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Thomas is currently the President and CEO of the Georgia Aerospace Systems, an Advanced Aerospace Composite manufacturing company which has supplied Nano composite materials structures for unmanned aerial vehicle systems for the US Department of Defense. He is also the Chairman of Lightwave Systems a Fiber Optics Cable Company that builds Broadband networks and Energy Platforms in the United States and Sub Saharan Africa.

 

[BiggWebb79]

 

[GiGi]

Slocum Massacre - 1910 in East Texas

In late July 1910, between 14 and 25 people were murdered by a large mob. The victims were all African-American; the mob of 200 to 300 people was all white. Before the massacre, the majority of Slocum's several hundred residents were black; afterward, many black residents of Slocum fled the town, losing real estate, homes, and other assets that they had to leave behind.

Several events may have sparked the attacks. After a black person was lynched nearby, rumors spread among whites that blacks were planning revenge. Also, a scuffle broke out over a business disagreement between a white and black resident, and many accounts say a man named James Spurger instigated events by claiming he was threatened by blacks.

Once the attacks began, Anderson County Sheriff W. H. Black reported, "Men were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them, and, so far as I was able to ascertain, without any real cause".[1] All known victims were unarmed and most were shot in the back; no whites were injured

http://zinnedproject.org/2014/07/slocum-massacre/

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/02/a-forgotten-slaughter-of-african-americans-in-texas/

 

[Bunchy Carter]

Roger Arliner Young
First African-American woman to receive a doctorate degree in zoology

Roger Arliner Young, born in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania in 1889, was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in zoology and to conduct research at the prestigious Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Young conducted research on the anatomy of paramecium and the effects of radiation on sea urchin eggs.

Young enrolled at Howard University at the age of twenty-seven, intending to major in music. After struggling through a biology course with African American biologist Ernest Everett Just, she changed her major to that subject, earning a B.S. in 1923. Just hired her as an assistant professor at Howard while she attended graduate school. The next year, Young enrolled at the University of Chicago part-time and published her first article on paramecium which achieved international recognition. She received her M.S in Zoology in 1926 and was elected to the honor society Sigma Xi.

Between 1927 and 1936 Young and Just worked together at Howard University and during the summers they conducted research at Woods Hole. While Just was in Europe, Young served as the substitute chair for Howard’s biology department. Upon his return to Howard in 1929, Young entered the Ph.D. program in biology at the University of Chicago. However, the pressures of her duties at Howard and her responsibilities to care for her invalid mother were counterproductive to her success. She failed the qualifying exam and returned to Howard where rumors of a romance with Just led to her dismissal in 1936. Young recovered from this low point to publish four articles between 1935 and 1938.

After leaving Howard, Young maintained ties with scientists she met at Woods Hole. One, V.L. Heilbrunn, recruited her to the University of Pennsylvania were she completed her Ph.D. in 1940. Between 1940 and 1953 she taught at North Carolina College and Shaw University, where she served as the Biology Department Chair. Young, affected by her mother’s death in 1953 and still under intense pressure as a solitary black female scientist, had difficulty holding a job. She worked at various black colleges until the late 1950s when she voluntarily committed herself to the Mississippi State Mental Asylum. After her release in 1962, Young lectured at Southern University until she died in 1964.

 

[Bunchy Carter]

J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr.
At 13, he became the University of Chicago’s youngest student

Jesse Ernest Wilkins, Jr. is often described as one of America’s most important contemporary mathematicians. At 13, he became the University of Chicago’s youngest student. Wilkins continued his studies there, earning bachelor, master, and doctorate degrees in mathematics. When he finished his Ph.D. at 19, he was hailed by the national press as a “negro genius.”

Wilkins was born in Chicago, Illinois on November 27, 1923 to Lucile Beatrice Robinson Wilkins who held a master's degree and taught in the Chicago Public School system. His father, J. Ernest Wilkins, a prominent attorney, was assistant Secretary of Labor during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration.

After completing his Ph.D., Wilkins taught mathematics for one year at Tuskegee Institute (1943-1944) before being recruited to work at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago where he contributed to the Manhattan Project. Wilkins worked there between 1944 and 1946.

In 1946 Wilkins then worked in private industry, first at the American Optical Company (1946-1950), then United Nuclear Corporation, which later became General Dynamics (1950-1960), and finally General Atomic Company (1960-1970). He also earned bachelor and master degrees in mechanical engineering from New York University in 1957 and 1960 respectively. In 1970, Wilkins became the Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematical Physics at Howard University. He was noted as being inspirational to his students and for starting Howard’s Ph.D. program in mathematics.

Wilkins returned to nuclear engineering by working at the firm of EG & G, Inc., a scientific technology firm, from 1977 to 1984 and then serving as a fellow at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory from 1984 to 1985. He retired in 1985 but that retirement lasted only five years. In 1990 he became the Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at Clark Atlanta University, a position he held until his death.

J. Ernest Wilkins was a member of numerous professional societies and has been awarded many honors in his distinguished career including: he has served as President of the American Nuclear Society (1974-1975), Council Member of the American Mathematical Society (1975-1977), and in 1980 he received the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal by the US Army. He published numerous papers in the fields of mathematics, optics, and nuclear engineering. His greatest contribution to scholarship was the development of mathematical models to explain gamma radiation and his subsequent work on developing a shielding against gamma radiation.

J. Ernest Wilkins died at his home in Fountain Hills, Arizona, on May 1, 2011.

 

[Michael9100]

 

[Easy-E]

Brehs, read this.

I have 50 pgs to go and I love it.

From the time he proposed to Lilian Gregory to when she had the baby to the next Christmas

DONE

on to

 

[Blackking]

Revolution of black conscious media... one of the pioneers

 

[Deadpool1986]

75 Years Ago, Hattie McDaniel Made History By Winning An Oscar

Here are five things you should know about the first African American to win an Academy Award.

Seventy-five years ago, Hattie McDaniel accepted the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her role as Mammy in the civil war epic Gone With the Wind, becoming the first African American to win the prestigious prize.

It was fitting that the award was handed out on a Leap Day, Feb. 29, 1940; the win was a momentous leap forward for African Americans in film. Since McDaniel won the award, 15 African-American actors have also won the golden statuette. Here are five things you should know about the trailblazing actress.

1. McDaniel had to get permission to enter the hotel where the awards ceremony was being held.which had a strict no-blacks policy. Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick had to pull strings so that McDaniel could enter the building. And even then, once McDaniel arrived, rather than being seated with her co-stars at the Gone With the Wind table, she was put at a table against the wall and in the back, where she sat with her escort and her white agent.


Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time McDaniel had to face racist policies while working on the film.

2. She was banned from the premiere of Gone With the Wind.

The film’s opening night at Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta on Dec. 15, 1939, was a spectacular affair, with thousands of people lining the streets to watch the limousines carry the stars to the theater. Selznick had wanted the entire cast, including McDaniel, to attend the premiere, but the South’s Jim Crow laws barred McDaniel and other black performers from sitting with their white co-stars in the theater. Images of her were even removed from the premiere’s program.

“[Selznick] wanted the black performers to go because he was going to use them to promote the film in the African-American community, where it had been receiving criticism,” Jill Watts, author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, told NPR.

When leading man Clark Gable heard that McDaniel wouldn’t be allowed to attend, he initially planned to boycott the screening. But McDaniel convinced him to go.

3. The whereabouts of her Oscar remain a mystery. When she died in 1952, McDaniel left her Oscar to Howard University, which had honored her with a luncheon after she won the award.

According to a 2010 article in the Washington Post, the university’s archivists said they never received the award, which was actually a plaque and not the golden statuette we’re all familiar with today (supporting actors wouldn’t start receiving the little golden man until 1943). But some students recalled seeing the award on display in the school’s drama department.

Speculation about the whereabouts of the award are vast and varied. One rumor had the award being thrown into the Potomac River after racial unrest caused by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Some say the award is probably stored away somewhere in the school’s archives. A 2009 NPR story even raised the possibility that university officials may have failed to recognized the simple plaque as a prestigious award. Others suspect it was stolen.

In 2011, George Washington University law professor W. Burlette Carter issued a report (pdf) on her year-and-a-half long investigation into the Oscar’s whereabouts. She concluded that the award was neither thrown into the Potomac nor stolen but rather was simply stored in the university’s theater department in the early ‘70s. She, too, suggested that those responsible for taking care of the university’s artifacts may not have realized the significance of the plaque.

4. She had the perfect response for haters.

Throughout her career, McDaniel was criticized by the black community, including the NAACP, for playing subservient parts that reinforced negative stereotypes of African Americans. Although McDaniel’s prospects didn’t change much after she won the Oscar, having worked as maid in real life, she knew which role she preferred.

“Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one," she reportedly once said to her critics.

according to her co-star Ann Rutherford.

Since then, views about McDaniel’s legacy have softened, and many now view her as a hero and pioneer. Mo’Nique, who won best supporting actress in 2010 for her role in Precious and who paid tribute to McDaniel in her acceptance speech, recently told the Hollywood Reporter, “If they knew who this woman really was, they would say, ‘Let me shut my mouth.’”

5. She helped abolish restrictive housing practices in California.

Racially restrictive covenants—provisions in housing deeds that barred the selling of homes to certain people such as blacks and Jews—weren’t just something found in the Deep South; they were pretty common in places such as Los Angeles, too. During legal challenges, McDaniel and other celebrity plaintiffs lent their names to the cause to raise awareness. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the restrictions unconstitutional.

http://www.theroot.com/articles/cul...e_the_first_african_american_to_win_an.2.html