Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
John P. Parker (1827 – February 4, 1900) was an African-American abolitionist, inventor, iron moulder and industrialist who helped hundreds of slaves to freedom in the Underground Railroad resistance movement based in Ripley, Ohio. He rescued fugitive slaves for nearly fifteen years. He was one of the few blacks to patent his inventions before 1900. His house in Ripley has been designated a National Historic Landmark and restored.
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Parker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a slave mother and white father. Born into slavery under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, at the age of eight John was forced to walk to Richmond, where he was sold at the slave market to a doctor from Mobile, Alabama.
While working in the doctor's house as a domestic servant, John was taught to read and write by the doctor's family, although the law forbade slaves' being educated.[1] During his apprenticeship in a foundry, John attempted escape and had conflicts with officials. He asked one of the doctor's patients, a widow, to purchase him. After taking title to him, she allowed him to hire out to earn money, and he purchased his freedom from her for $1,800 in 1845. He earned the money through his work in two of Mobile's iron foundries and occasional odd jobs.
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The historian Stuart Seely Sprague has researched much information about Parker and his life. Beginning as an iron moulder, Parker developed and patented a number of mechanical and industrial inventions, including the John P. Parker tobacco press and harrow (or pulverizer), patented in 1884 and 1885. He had invented the pulverizer while still a young man in Mobile in the 1840s.[2][3] Parker was one of the few blacks to patent an invention before 1900.
In 1865 with a partner, he bought a foundry company, which they called the Ripley Foundry and Machine Company. Parker managed the company, which manufactured engines, Dorsey's patent reaper and mower, and sugar mill. In 1876 he brought in a partner to manufacture threshers, and the company became Belchamber and Parker. Although they dissolved the partnership two years later, Parker continued to grow his business, adding a blacksmith shop and machine shop. In 1890, after a destructive fire at his first facility, Parker built the Phoenix Foundry. It was the largest between Cincinnati and Portsmouth, Ohio........Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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If we want to save Charm City, we must begin by reversing 100 years of segregation. Slate: The Deep, Troubling Roots of Baltimore’s Decline.
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Now, Baltimore is a city of 620,000, and the large majority—63.7 percent—are black. And unlike Ferguson, where demographic strength lagged political representation, Baltimore’s black residents have turned their presence into black mayors, black city councils, and black representatives to Annapolis. Far from a rarity, black leadership in Baltimore is a given that even extends to the police. Throughout the 1980s, the city worked to bring black Americans on to the force and promote them up through the ranks. As writer Stacia Brown notes for the New Republic, “The city believed the presence of black people in politics and law enforcement could foster greater trust and more open communication between black citizens and their government.”
All of this was a vital and admirable contribution to the city’s civic life. And yet, the basic position of Baltimore’s low-income blacks didn’t change.
In the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived before he died in police custody on April 12, one-half the residents are unemployed and one-third of the homes are vacant. Sixty percent of residents have less than a high school diploma, and the violent crime rate is among the highest in Baltimore. You can paint a similar picture for the neighborhoods and housing projects on the east side of the city as well. If you are poor and black in Charm City, your life—or at least your opportunity to have a better life—looks bleak.
But then, this is by design. In the early 20th century—as in many American cities—Baltimore civic leaders endorsed broad plans to “protect white neighborhoods” from black newcomers. The city was flush with waves of immigration—from abroad as well as the South—and more affluent blacks were leaving the older, poorer neighborhoods to move to predominantly white areas removed from the poverty and joblessness of the crowded slums. In short order, politicians and progressive reformers—motivated by benevolence, politics, and an en vogue scientific racism—endorsed segregation plans and racial covenants meant to cordon blacks—as well as Italian and Eastern European immigrants—on to small parts of land in the inner city.
A group of volunteers walks down North Avenue looking for trash to clean up from Monday night’s riots, Baltimore, April 29, 2015.
Photo by Jamelle Bouie
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A Baltimore writer on racial tension and the limits of diversity. The New Republic: Having Black Cops and Black Mayors Doesn't End Police Brutality.
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Baltimore has been resplendently, comfortingly black for as long as I can remember. My mother brought me here from predominantly white Lansing, Michigan in 1984, the same year then-Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer appointed Bishop L. Robinson Sr. as Baltimore’s first black police commissioner. A few years later, Kurt Schmoke, the city’s first black—and arguably its best—mayor took office. From kindergarten through high school, my classes and communities were at least 50 percent black—and I lived in Baltimore County, the relatively suburban region surrounding the inner city that boasted an even larger black population. Growing up where the children and adults in my life shared a cultural shorthand that was often specific to our race seemed not just significant, but rare and even magical at times.
As a young black girl, it was easy to idealize the black politicians and police officers who were so visible during my upbringing. In the 1980s, Baltimore was excelling where many American cities in 2015—including Ferguson, Missouri—are still failing to even begin: ensuring that black communities are also served by a significant number of black police officers and policymakers. The Baltimore Sun reported in 1992 that “within a year, all but one, or possibly two, of those holding any rank above major in the Baltimore force will be black” and “privately, white and black commanders alike acknowledge that the changes reflect the desire of city officials for a police force that reflects Baltimore's majority-black community.” The reasoning for these changes seemed obvious enough: The city believed the presence of black people in politics and law enforcement could foster greater trust and more open communication between black citizens and their government. We now have yet more evidence to dispute that notion, thanks to the still-mysterious fatal injuries suffered by Freddie Gray while in police custody earlier this month.
Until my teens, I romanticized the Baltimore City force, imagining that police and citizens who had race in common might understand one another better. But I rarely spent much time in the sections of Baltimore that were being increasingly ravaged by an influx of heroin and crack cocaine and the vestiges of generational poverty in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I wasn’t paying attention to Mayor Schmoke’s evolving stance on treating drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice issue—a position entirely at odds with the War on Drugs being waged, and lost, in the communities he governed. And I had far too little occasion to observe the goings-on in Sandtown-Winchester, the disproportionately impoverished, criminalized neighborhood where Gray was arrested on April 12, in an incident that would later lead to his death one week later. His spinal cord was reportedly 80 percent severed, allegedly due to the actions of six police officers, some of whom were black.
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Understand conservatives is simple as understanding they think "I'm rubber, and you're glue,...." RawStory: Ted Cruz blames Obama — saying the first black president has ‘inflamed racial tensions’.
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Senator Ted Cruz has accused Barack Obama, the country’s first African American president, of having “inflamed racial tensions” during his time in the White House.
Cruz, a Texan who is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, made the comments in a speech at a US Hispanic chamber of commerce event in Washington DC. The speech included other controversial assertions, including that the growth of national support for same-sex marriage was “heartbreaking” and that Democrats had tried to “scare” Hispanics into voting for them by talking about immigration.
Cruz said that Obama “could have chosen to be a leader” on race relations, but instead “has made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions – that have divided us rather than bringing us together”. Cruz also got in a dig at Vice-President Joe Biden, saying a comment Biden made during the 2012 presidential race had likewise detracted from racial comity.
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Sadly the girls and women rescued had fired on soldiers advancing on Boko Haram’s forest stronghold after becoming indoctrinated into believing the group’s ideology. The Guardian: Boko Haram's former captives need 'intensive psychological care'.
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Some of the nearly 300 girls and women freed by Nigeria’s military from the forest stronghold of Boko Haram were so transformed by their captivity that they opened fire on their rescuers, and experts said on Wednesday they would need intensive psychological treatment.
The military was flying in medical and intelligence teams to evaluate the former captives, many of whom were severely traumatised, said army spokesman Col Sani Usman.
He said earlier that none of the schoolgirls kidnapped from the northeastern town of Chibok a year ago appeared to be among the 200 girls and 93 women rescued on Tuesday. But on Wednesday he said further screening was needed before their identities could be determined.
“The processing is continuing, it involves a lot of things because most of them are traumatised and you have got to put them in a psychological frame of mind to extract information from them,” Usman said.
A counsellor who has treated other women freed from Boko Haram captivity said some had become indoctrinated into believing the group’s ideology, while others had established strong emotional attachments to militants they had been forced to marry.
Nigerian soldiers man a check point in Gwoza, Nigeria, a town newly liberated from Boko Haram. Photograph: Lekan Oyekanmi/AP
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