Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Henry Ransom Cecil McBay (1914–1995) was an African - American chemist and a teacher.
McBay was born "Henry Ransom McBay" (named from his maternal grandfather, Henry Ransom) in 1914 in Mexia, Texas. His father, William Cecil McBay, was a barber who eventually became an embalmer and funeral director; his mother, Roberta Ransom (McBay), was a seamstress.
McBay was able to receive a good education because of his proficiency in math. He was able to gain admission to Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and paid for his education by working in the college’s dining-hall and post office. Inspired by his math and chemistry professors, McBay studied organic chemistry and earned his B.S. degree in 1934. His Wiley professors helped him acquire a scholarship to Atlanta to work on his next degree.
With only $1.65 in his pocket, McBay immediately took a job in the Atlanta University dining hall so he could eat. After only a few days on campus, his faculty advisor, Professor K. A. Huggins, arranged for him to work in the chemistry laboratory.
McBay began to help Huggins study new types of plastics that had properties similar to natural rubber. Soon, McBay was performing his own analysis of the plastics. When the project was finished, he received his master’s degree from Atlanta University and Huggins received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. This indirect connection to the University of Chicago would later be important to his career.
After earning his master’s degree, he returned to Wiley College so he could help his younger brother and sister pay for college. However, going “home” proved to be a disappointment. Some faculty members still thought of him as their student and never accepted McBay as an academic peer. Because of his devotion to his siblings, however, he remained at Wiley until his brother received his college degree and his parents were able to pay for his sister’s education.
In 1938 McBay took a better-paying teaching job at a Quindaro, Kansas junior college. At the end of the first year, he enrolled in the University of Chicago summer school program, where he received good grades for that term. When he returned to Quindaro, he found that the new junior college principal had, for political reasons, hired an instructor in his place.
McBay then moved to a high school mathematics teaching position in Huntsville, Texas, where he stayed for three semesters. He then joined a newly formed research team at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama assigned the task of finding a suitable substitute for jute fiber. Indian shipments of jute, which was used for rope and fabrics for sacks, had ended due to World War I.
The Tuskegee team hoped to prove that okra stems would be an effective substitute, but McBay proved that by the time an okra plant had matured, the stems were too brittle. Okra could be harvested for food or for fiber, but not for both. Ironically, McBay had worked himself out of a job.......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The Supreme Court will review a case of blatant racism by prosecutors. For once, there’s a paper trail. Slate: Georgia Justice
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The prosecutors seeking to send Timothy Tyrone Foster to death row went about their job in a curious manner. During jury selection, they highlighted each black prospective juror’s name in green—on four different copies of the jury list—and wrote that the green highlighting “represents blacks.” On each black juror’s questionnaire, prosecutors circled the response “black” next to a question about race. They also referred to three black jurors as “B#1,” “B#2,” and “B#3” in their notes. Finally, the prosecution’s investigator ranked each black juror against the others—in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.”
The prosecutors struck each black candidate, one by one, from the jury pool until none remained.
At the end of the trial, prosecutors asked the jury to impose the death penalty on Foster, to “deter other people out there in the projects.” The all-white jury convicted Foster of murder and sentenced him to death.
Foster, a black man, appealed his conviction to the Georgia Supreme Court. Striking black jurors on account of their race is unconstitutional, and Foster believed he deserved a new trial. But the Georgia Supreme Court rejected his claim. Prosecutors had not “demonstrated purposeful discrimination” in striking black jurors, the court held. There was no racial bias in the prosecution of Timothy Tyrone Foster. His execution could move forward.
Prosecutors highlighted each black prospective juror’s name in green and wrote that the green highlighting “represents blacks.”
Photo illustration by Slate. Document image by Southern Center for Human Rights, photo by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via Reuters.
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It would be hard not to notice that some of the police officers who have been charged or indicted in high-profile brutality cases are people of color. ColorLines: Hiring More Cops of Color Won't End Police Violence Against Black Civilians
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It would be hard not to notice that some of the police officers who have been charged or indicted in high-profile brutality cases are people of color. For instance, in February, a Chinese-American officer from New York City, Peter Liang, was charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting Akai Gurley, an unarmed black Brooklyn man, in the stairwell of a public housing development. And the six Baltimore cops charged with killing Freddie Gray include three black officers. These outcomes stand out in a national pattern in which police are rarely charged with misconduct and even more rarely convicted of it. As police departments get better at hiring people of color, I suspect that we’ll see more bad behavior involving officers of color. That may make it harder to focus on the systemic racial bias at the heart of bad policing. To do so, we will need to redefine racism as systemic, hidden and unconscious, rather than as individual, overt and deliberate.
Hoping that officers of color will improve relations between departments and communities of color, various parties have been pushing for the hiring of more officers of color as a key intervention. Charles Ogletree, executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Ethnicity at Harvard, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2000 that such hiring was critical “so that the communities of people of color will begin to see a police force that ‘looks like us.’” Reporters noted that the Ferguson Police Department had only four officers of color for a community that is 66 percent African-American. The NAACP asked Providence, Rhode Island, mayor Jorge O. Elorza to see to the hiring of high-ranking black officers, and the Minneapolis Police Department is working hard to diversify their slate.
Demonstrators march toward the police station as protests continue in the wake of 18-year-old Michael Brown's death on October 22, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
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A private school in New York City, Fieldston Lower School, is taking a controversial approach to racism. The Grio: New York school combats racism by segregating students
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rivate school in New York City, Fieldston Lower School, is taking a controversial approach to racism and race issues by dividing its third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders into groups by race during a five week program, then bringing them all back together to share their thoughts in mixed settings.
L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, a professor of sociology and black studies at the City University of New York, said that the idea of dividing students into these “affinity groups” is actually a good idea.
“The goal is to separate kids apart to get them to talk about the realities that they come from, to see the diversity within them and then to re-engage in a conversation not simply about ‘you look different than me,’ but what is the baggage and the weight that we carry into the room and how do we create a more equitable, diverse and just environment,” he said.
Sachi Feris, a blogger who runs Raising Race Conscious Children, said that the program can be especially useful in showing white children the privilege that they might not have even noticed in their own race.
“Because whiteness isn’t always named and is treated as invisible and sort of the neutral norm in our society … you have a situation where white children don’t even necessarily know the word ‘white’ and know that they’re white and know what the role of whiteness plays in terms of white privilege and power in our society,” Feris said.
Black students (File photo)
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