The Random stories of Black History thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Thread starter Sonic Boom of the South
- Start date
Saw these out on Tumblr. Our ladies had that inventive spirit…we as a people are inventive, we just need to cultivate that talent
Didn’t know Fatburger was started by a sister
The Man who taught Charles Darwin Taxidermy
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The Man who taught Charles Darwin Taxidermy
Discover the latest news from The Linnean Society of London.
www.linnean.org
The Man who taught Charles Darwin Taxidermy
Published on 2nd October 2018This October, for Black History Month, we are exploring the contributions to natural history that have been made by people of African/ Caribbean origin. A famous example involves one of the greatest natural historians of our time, Charles Darwin.
In the above quote, Darwin writes of his taxidermy lessons under the tutelage of a freed slave. According to R.B. Freeman in ‘Darwin’s negro bird-stuffer’ from the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science (1978) this gentleman was John Edmonstone, originally a slave of Charles Edmonstone from Warrows Place, Mibiri Creek in British Guyana.
John Edmonstone was taught the art of taxidermy by Charles Waterton, a 19th century naturalist. Waterton speaks of Edmonstone in his book Wanderings of South America (1825), albeit with less affection than Darwin:
"It was upon this hill in former days that I first tried to teach John, the black slave of my friend Mr. Edmonstone, the proper way to do birds. But John had poor abilities, and it required much time and patience to drive any thing into him. Some years after this his master took him to Scotland, where, becoming free, John left him, and got employed in the Glasgow, and then the Edinburgh Museum. ”
Edmonstone moved to Edinburgh in 1823, after six years in Glasgow, finding employment teaching the university students how to preserve animals. He lived at 37 Lothian Street until 1825 (close to both the University and where Darwin and his brother Erasmus lodged at the time), and was later recorded as living at 6 South St David’s Street (between 1832 and 1833).
Whilst little is known about him, we do know Edmonstone was teaching and influencing one of the greatest minds of the 19th century. From a letter to his sister, Susan Elizabeth, we learn that Darwin first met Edmonstone in 1826, at the impressionable age of 17.
“I am going to learn to stuff birds, from a blackamoor I believe an old servant of Dr. Duncan: it has the recommendation of cheapness, if it has nothing else, as he only charges one guinea, for an hour every day for two months.”
In total, Darwin spent 40 hours training with Edmonstone, not just learning this necessary skill but also hearing of the flora and fauna in distant South America. Only five years later in 1831, Darwin undertook his historic voyage on board the HMS Beagle, on which he first began to form his theory on natural selection. Darwin would have taken with him his newly acquired taxidermy skills as well as his enlightening conversations with Edmonstone. The Galápagos finches, used to support his theory on the transmutation of species, were preserved using the techniques that Edmonstone had taught him.
If not for an aside in Darwin’s autobiography, would we have ever known about the monumental contribution of John Edmonstone, a former slave from Guyana? It makes you wonder how many more significant yet undiscovered contributions people of colour have made to the study of natural history.
By Leanne Melbourne, Events and Communications Manager
1000 years before Darwin, an African Muslim scholar wrote about natural selection
Professors are starting to orient Charles Darwin within a rich history of people from all cultures who have grappled with the mechanisms of life. Recently, New York University professor James Higham tweeted about how he updated the lectures of his class on primate behavioral ecology, geared to...
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The Chemist Alice Ball Pioneered a Treatment for Leprosy in 1915–and Then Others Stole the Credit for It
www.openculture.com
It’s bittersweet whenever a pioneering, long overlooked female scientist is finally given the recognition she deserves, especially so when the scientist in question is a person of color.
Chemist Alice Ball’s youth and drive – just 23 in 1915, when she discovered a gentle, but effective method for treating leprosy – make her an excellent role model for students with an interest in STEM.
But in a move that’s only shocking for its familiarity, an opportunistic male colleague, Arthur Dean, finagled a way to claim credit for her work.
We’ve all heard the tales of female scientists who were integral team players on important projects, who ultimately saw their role vastly downplayed upon publication or their names left off of a prestigious award.
But Dean’s claim that he was the one who had discovered an injectable water-soluble method for treating leprosy with oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra fruit is all the more galling, given that he did so after Alice Ball’s tragically early death at the age of 24, suspected to be the result of accidental poisoning during a classroom lab demonstration.
Not everyone believed him.
Ball, the University of Hawaii chemistry department’s first Black female graduate student, and, subsequently, its first Black female chemistry instructor, had come to the attention of Harry T. Hollmann, a U.S. Public Health Officer who shared her conviction that chaulmoogra oil might hold the key to treating leprosy.
After her death in 1916, Hollmann reviewed Dean’s publications regarding the highly successful new leprosy treatment then referred to as the Dean Method and wrote that he could not see “any improvement whatsoever over the original [method] as worked out by Miss Ball:”
After a great amount of experimental work, Miss Ball solved the problem for me by making the ethyl esters of the fatty acids found in chaulmoogra oil.
Type “the Dean Method leprosy” into a search engine and you’ll be rewarded with a satisfying wealth of Alice Ball profiles, all of which go into detail regarding her discovery of what became known as the Ball Method, in use until the 1940s.
Kathleen M. Wong’s article on this trailblazing scientist in the Smithsonian Magazine delves into why Hollmann’s professional efforts to posthumously confer credit where credit was due were insufficient to secure Ball her rightful place in science history.
That began to change in the 1990s when Stan Ali, a retiree researching Black people in Hawaii, found his interest piqued by a reference to a “young Negro chemist” working on leprosy in The Samaritans of Molokai.
Ali teamed up with Paul Wermager, a retired University of Hawaii librarian, and Kathryn Waddell Takara, a poet and professor in the Ethnic Studies Department. Together, they began combing over old sources for any passing reference to Ball and her work. They came to believe that her absence from the scientific record owed to sexism and racism:
During and just after her lifetime, she was believed to be part Hawaiian, not Black. (Her birth and death certificates list both Ball and her parents as white, perhaps to “make travel, business and life in general easier,” according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.) In 1910, Black people made up just 0.4 percent of Hawaiʻi’s population.
“When [the newspapers] realized she was not part Hawaiian, but [Black], they felt they had made an embarrassing mistake, forgetting about it and hoping it would go away,” Ali said. “It did for 75 years.”
Their combined efforts spurred the state of Hawaii to declare February 28 Alice Ball Day. The University of Hawaii installed a commemorative plaque near a chaulmoogra tree on campus. Her portrait hangs in the university’s Hamilton Library, alongside a posthumously awarded Medal of Distinction.
(“Meanwhile,” as Carlyn L. Tani dryly observes in Honolulu Magazine, “Dean Hall on the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa campus stands as an enduring monument to Arthur L. Dean.)
Further afield, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine celebrated its 120th anniversary by adding Ball’s, Marie Sklodowska-Curie’s and Florence Nightingale’s names to a frieze that had previously honored 23 eminent men.
And now, the Godmother of Punk Patti Smith has taken it upon herself to introduce Ball to an even wider audience, after running across a reference to her while conducting research for her just released A Book of Days.
As Smith notes in an interview with Numéro:
Things have really changed. I think we are living in a very beautiful period of time because there are so many female artists, poets, scientists, and activists. Through books especially, we are rediscovering and valuing the women who have been unjustly forgotten in our history. During my research, I came across a young black scientist who lived in Hawaii in the 1920s. At that time, there was a big leper colony in Hawaii. She had discovered a treatment using the oil from the seeds of a tree to relieve the pain and allow patients to see their friends and family. Her name was Alice Ball, and she died at just 24 after a terrible chemical accident during an experiment. Her research was taken up by a professor who removed her name from the study to take full credit. It is only recently that people have discovered that she was the one who did the work.
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The Chemist Alice Ball Pioneered a Treatment for Leprosy in 1915–and Then Others Stole the Credit for It
It's bittersweet whenever a pioneering, long overlooked female scientist is finally given the recognition she deserves, especially so when the scientist in question is a person of color.
www.openculture.com
It’s bittersweet whenever a pioneering, long overlooked female scientist is finally given the recognition she deserves, especially so when the scientist in question is a person of color.
Chemist Alice Ball’s youth and drive – just 23 in 1915, when she discovered a gentle, but effective method for treating leprosy – make her an excellent role model for students with an interest in STEM.
But in a move that’s only shocking for its familiarity, an opportunistic male colleague, Arthur Dean, finagled a way to claim credit for her work.
We’ve all heard the tales of female scientists who were integral team players on important projects, who ultimately saw their role vastly downplayed upon publication or their names left off of a prestigious award.
But Dean’s claim that he was the one who had discovered an injectable water-soluble method for treating leprosy with oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra fruit is all the more galling, given that he did so after Alice Ball’s tragically early death at the age of 24, suspected to be the result of accidental poisoning during a classroom lab demonstration.
Not everyone believed him.
Ball, the University of Hawaii chemistry department’s first Black female graduate student, and, subsequently, its first Black female chemistry instructor, had come to the attention of Harry T. Hollmann, a U.S. Public Health Officer who shared her conviction that chaulmoogra oil might hold the key to treating leprosy.
After her death in 1916, Hollmann reviewed Dean’s publications regarding the highly successful new leprosy treatment then referred to as the Dean Method and wrote that he could not see “any improvement whatsoever over the original [method] as worked out by Miss Ball:”
After a great amount of experimental work, Miss Ball solved the problem for me by making the ethyl esters of the fatty acids found in chaulmoogra oil.
Type “the Dean Method leprosy” into a search engine and you’ll be rewarded with a satisfying wealth of Alice Ball profiles, all of which go into detail regarding her discovery of what became known as the Ball Method, in use until the 1940s.
Kathleen M. Wong’s article on this trailblazing scientist in the Smithsonian Magazine delves into why Hollmann’s professional efforts to posthumously confer credit where credit was due were insufficient to secure Ball her rightful place in science history.
That began to change in the 1990s when Stan Ali, a retiree researching Black people in Hawaii, found his interest piqued by a reference to a “young Negro chemist” working on leprosy in The Samaritans of Molokai.
Ali teamed up with Paul Wermager, a retired University of Hawaii librarian, and Kathryn Waddell Takara, a poet and professor in the Ethnic Studies Department. Together, they began combing over old sources for any passing reference to Ball and her work. They came to believe that her absence from the scientific record owed to sexism and racism:
During and just after her lifetime, she was believed to be part Hawaiian, not Black. (Her birth and death certificates list both Ball and her parents as white, perhaps to “make travel, business and life in general easier,” according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.) In 1910, Black people made up just 0.4 percent of Hawaiʻi’s population.
“When [the newspapers] realized she was not part Hawaiian, but [Black], they felt they had made an embarrassing mistake, forgetting about it and hoping it would go away,” Ali said. “It did for 75 years.”
Their combined efforts spurred the state of Hawaii to declare February 28 Alice Ball Day. The University of Hawaii installed a commemorative plaque near a chaulmoogra tree on campus. Her portrait hangs in the university’s Hamilton Library, alongside a posthumously awarded Medal of Distinction.
(“Meanwhile,” as Carlyn L. Tani dryly observes in Honolulu Magazine, “Dean Hall on the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa campus stands as an enduring monument to Arthur L. Dean.)
Further afield, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine celebrated its 120th anniversary by adding Ball’s, Marie Sklodowska-Curie’s and Florence Nightingale’s names to a frieze that had previously honored 23 eminent men.
And now, the Godmother of Punk Patti Smith has taken it upon herself to introduce Ball to an even wider audience, after running across a reference to her while conducting research for her just released A Book of Days.
As Smith notes in an interview with Numéro:
Things have really changed. I think we are living in a very beautiful period of time because there are so many female artists, poets, scientists, and activists. Through books especially, we are rediscovering and valuing the women who have been unjustly forgotten in our history. During my research, I came across a young black scientist who lived in Hawaii in the 1920s. At that time, there was a big leper colony in Hawaii. She had discovered a treatment using the oil from the seeds of a tree to relieve the pain and allow patients to see their friends and family. Her name was Alice Ball, and she died at just 24 after a terrible chemical accident during an experiment. Her research was taken up by a professor who removed her name from the study to take full credit. It is only recently that people have discovered that she was the one who did the work.
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Janet Collins broke color barriers in the 1950s when she became the first African American prima ballerina and one of the very few prominent black women in American classical ballet.
Collins was born in New Orleans, LA, on this date March 7, 1917, and today we are honored to share a glimpse into the life of a crucial figure in ballet history.
Ms. Collins made her debut as the leading dancer in the Met’s production of “Aïda.” She went on to become the first African American prima ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera. Ms. Collins was also a member of SAB’s guest faculty, teaching modern dance classes at the School from 1949-1950 and then again from 1967-1969.
“Everything was clear. But the speed with which Janet Collins moved was unbelievable,” said Arthur Mitchell an American dancer, choreographer, and director who was the first African American to become a principal dancer with a major ballet troupe, New York City Ballet. He later cofounded the Dance Theatre of Harlem.
“There was a wonderful feeling of flight all the time, but not flight to get away, flight to move. And she really reveled in the movement, she reveled in the movement. And as Balanchine said, ‘a dance is movement through time and space.’ She was the embodiment of that when she danced.”
Fred McIntyre known as Devil’s Man holds in his hands a portrait of the Kaiser framed with bullets that he took from a German Soldier
Corporal Fred McIntyre served in World War I with the USA Army’s 369th Infantry Regiment, a lavishly decorated regiment that was better known by its nickname: the Harlem Hellfighters. The Hellfighters, part of the New York National Guard, stood out for several reasons: uncommon courage, the exceptional ragtime-influenced brass band, and their Afroness. Only ten percent of the American soldiers were African.
In July 1918 they were fighting alongside the French along the Marne River. In fact, militarily they became French, as the 369th were integrated into the French Army. They wore hybrid uniforms (including the French Adrian helmet), carried Gallic rifles, and received French troop wine rations.
The Harlem Hellfighters accumulated more casualties on the Western Front than any other American regiment, but received numerous medals for their bravery. One member of the regiment, Henry Porter, nicknamed Black Death, was the first American to receive the prestigious Croix de Guerre, which was also awarded collectively to the entire 369th Regiment.
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