This year, for Black History Month, the Subject Leaders have explored Black pioneers within their respective fields to demonstrate their expansive contributions to society across generations. Holistically understanding Black people’s history will allow us to celebrate their achievements with openness and awareness, equipping us to prevent future underrepresentation.
Maths
Have you ever used a GPS system? Or Google Maps, perhaps? I thought so.
Well, have you ever wondered how one of the most important technological advancements in the modern world came to be developed, and who could be behind it?
The answer is a Black mathematician named Gladys West, born 1930 in Virginia. She attended school at ‘the red schoolhouse’, as it was known, and had to walk three miles every day to get there and back, despite also working on her parents’ farm. From a young age Gladys stood out academically and her parents started saving some money for her to go to college, however they were unsuccessful. It wasn’t until her teacher announced a scholarship for the two highest achievers in her year that Gladys’ dreams could become a reality. The scholarship allowed her to attend Virginia State University where she decided to major in Mathematics, eventually earning her master’s degree. After graduating, she was offered a job at a naval base in Virginia as one of only four Black employees, and one of two Black female programmers. Around this time, large scale protests surrounding the civil rights movement began to take place in America, however Gladys – who worked in a government job – wasn’t allowed to take part. She decided to become a role model within the naval base as her own act of silent protest, hoping that by working hard and committing herself to her projects, she would help to reduce the stigma that people of colour faced. As she gained the respect of her colleagues, she moved up in the naval base, and in 1979 she received a commendation for her work as department head. Gladys then became Project Manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project and programmed an IBM 7030 stretch computer (which was much faster than other computers used at the time) to provide calculations for an accurate model of the Earth. The work she produced whilst on the project become the foundations of the modern GPS systems that we all use today, and to recognise her phenomenal achievement she was inducted into the US Air Force Hall of Fame.
Art
Augusta Savage played a crucial role in the development of 20thcentury art. Her early career is marked by obvious talent, as in 1921 she beat 143 male candidates for a scholarship to study at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and won a second scholarship in 1923 for the Fontainebleau School of Fine Art in France. When the French government retracted her scholarship after learning that she was Black, Savage wrote letters to newspapers in Europe and America where the story was published. While studying in France, two of Savage’s works were accepted to the Salone d’Automne. She exhibited in the Grand Palais in Paris, and she won a grant to travel for eight months through France, Belgium, and Germany. On her return to New York, Augusta Savage was a part of the Harlem Renaissance, a revival of African American art, literature, music, fashion, theatre, and politics – during which she earned a reputation for her work as a portrait sculptor. Savage would dedicate her later career to creating opportunities for black Artists to study art and exhibit their work, opening the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts where she taught young artists, and being the first Black woman to open an art gallery in America. In 1939, her 16ft high Harp was exhibited in the 1939 World Fair to five million visitors and is reported to have been one of the most popular works, but Savage did not have the funds to transport it after the fair, and it was destroyed by bulldozers. She was frequently unable to afford to make sculptures from bronze, and instead used plaster painted with shoe polish to imitate bronze – because of this many of her sculptures crumbled over time, or they have simply been lost. Savage said, ‘I have created nothing… really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngers to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work.’ She has since had retrospective exhibitions in New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Florida, her hometown, and several of the artists she taught became internationally renowned, including Norman Lewis, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles Alston, whose bust of Martin Luther King Jr sits in the White House.
Chemistry
Professor Omowunmi Sadik had a scientific upbringing, being introduced to the subject by her father – a pharmaceutical chemist – and developed an avid interest in Biology, Physics and Chemistry during school. Having completed a BSc degree in Chemistry from the University of Lagos in Nigeria, and a PhD in Chemistry from Wollollong University in Australia, she pursued a career in research and has currently published ~200 peer-reviewed works, holds five US patents in biosensors and sustainable nanotechnology and has lectured all over the globe. However, providing numbers alone does not show the scope of the work she has done in advancing the field of Chemistry.
In 2012, Sadik co-founded the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organisation with the aim of advancing sustainable nanotechnology, through education, research, and promotion. Nanotechnology is the design of tiny nanoscale structures, produced by swapping out individual atoms, and it is predicted to be of great importance in the future of the environment and healthcare. Sadik is also the director of NJIT BIOSensors Materials for Advanced Research and Technology (BIOSMART). The goal of BIOSMART is to understand how chemical energy is converted between interfaces in order to pursue innovating biosensing technologies to improve healthcare and the environment. Biosensors are devices that quantitatively and accurately measure a target species in a system, such as nucleic acids, and uses the data to detect and monitor environmental pollutants such as drugs and explosives. She has also developed a biosensor that can detect the presence of the HIV virus in minutes – a big improvement from the ELISA test that takes days.
Omowunmi Sadik has made all these contributions recently, and although it is important to recognise the influential Chemists of the past, we should also look to the future and appreciate those who are performing pioneering research to benefit our present society.
Spanish
Within the Spanish speaking world, Rita Gertrudis Bosaho Gori is an influential Black figure in modern politics. She was born in Equatorial Guinea and moved to Spain at a young age to escape political conflict in her home country. She lived with foster parents across Spain before moving to Alicante, where she attended university. During her time there, she worked as a nurse for over twenty years whilst earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In addition to this she was, and still is, a strong advocate for women’s and civil rights for racial minorities in Spain.
This led her to work in politics, and in 2014, she helped to found the left-wing populist party called Podemos. It is a political party in Spain that protests inequality and corruption and literally translates as “We can”. She became the first Black member of parliament, male or female, in Spain in 2015 and as of 2020, Bosaho has been the Director of Equal Treatment and Ethnic Racial Diversity in the Ministry of Equality.
Bosaho’s achievements are significant milestones in Spanish and European politics. They reflect her motivations for getting involved in politics: to increase diversity within Spain and its government and to improve the life of immigrants and women in the country. This can be seen in her use of the statistic that 12% of Spaniards are immigrants but they only occupy 1% of their government. These accomplishments highlight her significance in Black Spanish history and should be celebrated because they mark a shift in Spanish attitudes about immigration. She states that she is a proud “Hispanic-Guinean and [is] interested in the problems of the people on both shores.”
Computer Science
Clarence ‘Skip’ Ellis (1943-2014) was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D in Computer Science (1969) and to be elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1997).
While working at Xerox PARC (a research and development company) and Stanford University in the 1970s and 80s, Ellis contributed to the development of icon-based user interfaces, object-oriented programming languages and collaborative software. He was in the team that worked on Xerox Alto, the first PC, that was initially used by labs and universities, but became well known in Silicon Valley and was seen as the ‘future of computing’. While it was never widely commercialised, the knowledge gained from the Alto’s development was used for later PCs, in particular by Apple.
Ellis was a pioneer in collaborative software, leading the Groupware Research Group at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. His efforts were hugely important in the development of real-time collaborative editing and operational transformation – the technique that is now used by Google Docs and allows multiple people to edit the same document.
Biology
George Washington-Carver was an African American who was born into slavery in mid-1860s. As a young adult he was accepted into Highland University in Kansas, however, wasn’t allowed to go because of his ethnicity. A few years later his talents were noticed by a professor at Iowa State, who invited him to attend, and he ended up studying Botany at Iowa State Agricultural college, where he was the first Black student. He received his master’s in 1896 and went on to teach as the first professor of colour at Iowa state. While there, he developed methods to prevent soil depletion from repeated planting of cotton by urging farmers to restore nitrogen to their soils through crop rotation. This improved cotton yield and meant that in the off years, other plants could be planted for food. After teaching, he founded an industrial research laboratory where he and his assistants worked to popularize the new crops by developing many of them; he invented over 300 uses for the peanut. During this time President F. Roosevelt publicly admired his work and he was made a member of the British Royal Society of Arts in 1916 — a rare honour for an American. He also advised prominent leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and President Teddy Roosevelt on agriculture and nutrition, and in 1920 he testified about the issues of implementing tariffs on peanuts imported from China. It was highly unusual for an African American to appear as an expert witness in congress and because of his expertise, the tariff was passed. In his seventies, he started the George Washington-Carver Institute, which funds agricultural research to this day. He is the forefather of the organic agricultural movement and a supporter of natural pesticides and fertilizers.
Product Design
Nefertiti Austin, a History professor at West Los Angeles College, says ‘Because of racism and . . . history that centers white men as heroes and Black people as lacking the intellect to contribute to the development of the United States, people are often shocked to learn about contributions of Black scientists, botanists, composers and inventors,’. Famous inventions such as light bulbs and the iPhone are often spoken about- although notably most of these inventions are credited to white men. Garrett Morgan invented both the three-light traffic light and the gas mask – the traffic light allows cars and pedestrians to cross streets safely, whilst the gas mask protects firefighters and other rescuers from inhaling smoke and dangerous fumes. Garrett Morgan only had a sixth grade education, however designed the three-light diagram after seeing a car crash – improving on previous lights which had previously only said stop and go. The aforementioned lightbulb? Also much improved by a Black man; in 1881, Lewis Latimer invented a much longer-lasting version that used a carbon filament rather than more incendiary materials like bamboo – he then went on to work with Edison at the Edison Electric Light Company.
Physics
Mae Jemison is a black physicist whose contributions to Physics remain overlooked. Born in Alabama in 1956, she graduated from Stanford University before practising medicine for two years, conducting research into bone cells. Her strong background in science, and experience as an engineer at the Kennedy Space Centre, led Jemison to successfully apply for the NASA Astronaut Program in 1987. Her accomplishment not only made her the first Black woman in space – in her role as a mission specialist on Endeavour – but was also crucial to improving NASA technology (after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle the year before), as her research on the impacts of weightlessness and motion sickness on bone cells provided NASA with vital insight into the effects of space travel on the human body. Her work was critical to improving the safety of all future missions. Passionate about encouraging engagement with science, she went on the open international space camps for teenagers and started a charity to help disadvantaged students in the US access careers in STEM.
Economics
William A. Darity Jr. is an African American economist and social science researcher, with his research covering economic history, development economics, economic psychology, and the history of economic thought. Although he grew up in an affluent environment, William learned about poverty, inequality, and social injustice from his parents. These problems continued to be important to him, and lead him to study economics, hoping to discover reasons why some people are born into lives of deprivation. His research focuses on inequality by race, class, ethnicity, schooling, and the racial achievement gap. He has published multiple papers, mostly around the issue of skin tone influencing the employment sector. By investigating the physiological influence race has on economic decisions, Darity Jr has advanced the awareness of problems like these in society. Some of his most cited published papers include ‘Evidence on Discrimination in Employment’, ‘Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?’. His 2005 paper, published in the Journal of Economics and Finance on the role of intergroup inequality, is how he is most famously recognised as ‘founder of stratification economics’, which refers to studies on the separation of social classes in society. His most recent book From Here to Equality provides an overview of how racism and discrimination has crippled the economic opportunities for many Black individuals. Darity Jr. provided overwhelming evidence of “the pernicious impact of white supremacy” along with the effect of slavery on the nation’s development and the ongoing failure of the country to take action to bridge racial economic inequality. The substantial research he has produced through his lifetime has led him to be described as the US’s “leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality”, and his work against the issues helps to bring awareness about the racial wealth divide.
French
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was born into slavery in 1962 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to a white French nobleman and a Black slave. He moved to France with his father at age 14, where slavery had been illegal since 1315, and he would be freed de facto by being in France. At age 24, he entered the French military, where he took his mother’s name (Dumas) rather than his father’s (Davy de la Pailleterie), as his father did not want his reputation to be ruined by having his surname in the low ranks of the military. However, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas rose through the ranks unusually quickly; in 1793, he commanded 53,000 troops as General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps. His success in the Alps facilitated the French’s Second Italian Campaign against the Austrian Empire, where he was nicknamed ‘Black Devil’ by the Austrians, ‘the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol’ by Napoleon Bonaparte, and later ‘Mr Humanity’ by the French, for his treatment of and care for other people. After criticising the Commander-in-Chief upon his return from Napoleon’s Egypt campaign, Dumas was imprisoned in Italy. Returning two years later to France, he found that Napoleon was trying to re-establish slavery in the colonies and purge Black officers from the military. He soon had a son, Alexandre Dumas, who received much recognition as a renowned French playwright and is still well-known today. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas died in poverty a few years later, after the introduction of French laws which eradicated the rights of people of colour that had just been established after the revolution.
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, unlike his son, has been largely forgotten in France – despite being the first person of colour in the French military to become brigadier general, divisional general, and general-in-chief of a French army. It is likely that without his famous son, the history of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas would be even less well-known. While we might expect his story to be celebrated as a symbol of ‘égalité’ in the aftermath of the French Revolution, support for General Dumas to be posthumously awarded the ‘Légion d’Honneur’ has always been ignored, and the only statue of him (which was publicly funded) was melted down by the Nazis. This calls into question the reasons behind this lack of recognition for his invaluable efforts and accomplishments – he lived through a time of French colonialism and exploitation, and this is a part of French history that people tend to shy away from. It is both possible and important that we recognise the achievements of Black people such as Dumas, whilst still considering the contextual significance of the time.
Philosophy
Sophie Bosede Oluwole was a Nigerian philosopher born in 1935, who died in 2018. She was the first woman to earn a PhD in Philosophy in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan and was vocal about the disproportionate representation of African thinkers in education.
She also brought to light many of the different types of philosophy available. It is important to learn about the wide range of thinking other than the ‘traditional’ philosophy we are taught at school. Oluwole taught African Philosophy for six years between 2002 and 2008 at the University of Lagos and practised Yoruba philosophy (a folk philosophy and a way of thinking that stems from the ethnic group based in Nigeria). It consists of a set of narratives and cultural practices that attempt to explain the causes and the nature of things affecting the corporeal and the spiritual universe.
Philosophy is largely dominated by white men, mostly because it was only available to the ‘intellectuals’ who had the highest form of education; back in the time of Socrates, Black women would not have been offered this education. Philosophy was almost alien to Sophie as a child because Nigeria was under British colonial rule until 1960, and racist attitudes towards Black people meant they were not taken seriously academically.
She found parallels between Socrates, who is the founder of Western philosophy and Orunmila, who is the creator of Yoruba knowledge known as Ifa. Socrates says, ‘the highest truth is that which is eternal and unchangeable’, whereas Orunmila says ‘truth is the word that can never be corrupted’. Both philosophers’ reason that the nature of the highest being is that it never changes and is consistent. By making these comparisons, Sophie showed and continues to empower Black girls and show that they can certainly be philosophers.
