USAO Black Student Alliance

02/05/2021

This time, we share the story of a woman who proved to be vital to the advancement of medical research, Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta Lacks was born on August 1st, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. Lacks spent her early years in rural Clover, Virginia working with most of her family as a to***co farmer. She moved to Turner Station near Dundalk, Maryland in 1941. Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951 after the birth of her fifth child and sought treatment for her advanced cervical cancer at John Hopkins Hospital; one of the only health-care facilities in the United States at the time that served African Americans. Lacks ultimately succumbed to her cancer on October 4th, 1951 at the age of 31.

Lacks is most famous for her cancer cells which are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line. These cells were unknowingly extracted from her during a cervical tumor biopsy and sent to the tissue lab of cancer and virus researcher Dr. George G*y. G*y had been collecting cancer cells from the cervical cancer patients who came to John Hopkins for treatment and found that all these cells would eventually die. However, G*y discovered that the cells from Lacks did not die but instead doubled every 20 to 24 hours. This discovery led to Lacks’s cells being used to study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones, and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without the need to experiment on living humans. These cells have also been used to test the effects of radiation and poisons, to study the human genome, played an important role in the development of the polio vaccine, and have even been used in research for vaccines against COVID-19.

There is currently much controversy over the original sourcing of Lacks’s cells and whether it was ethical for medical researchers to take these cells without permission from Lacks. The exploitation of Lacks underscores the historic exploitation of blacks by medical institutions in the United States. Lacks being a poor African American left her vulnerable to the acts of medical researchers and allowed them to profit off her body. This oppression and abuse by the medical community has contributed to the black community viewing medical authorities through a lens of suspicion.

Although Henrietta Lacks was unjustly taken advantage of, the information gained from her cells proved invaluable to the advancement of medicine and has both indirectly and directly saved the lives of countless people around the world.

“We are deeply committed to the ongoing efforts at our institutions and elsewhere to honor the contributions of Henrietta Lacks.” – John Hopkins Medicine

02/04/2021

Today we share the story of one of the greatest American frontier heroes that helped tame the Wild West, Bass Reeves.

Bass Reeves was born in July of 1838 in Crawford County, Arkansas. Reeves was born to slave parents and he himself was a slave owned by William Reeves. Reeves later relocated to Grayson county, Texas with his slave owner and spent most of his childhood there working alongside his parents. Standing at 6’2”, Reeves was a physically imposing man and he was eventually able to escape slavery during the wake of the Civil War. He found refuge in Indian Territory, later to be known as Oklahoma. His time living among the Cherokee and Seminole tribes of Indian Territory allowed him to become familiar with the land, practices, and languages of those tribes. This knowledge proved invaluable in his development of good detective skills and marksmanship.

Reeves is most famous for being the first black deputy United States marshal west of the Mississippi River. Before his time as a deputy marshal, Reeves bought land in Van Buren, Arkansas where he lived as a farmer and rancher. Occasionally, Reeves would serve as a scout and guide for U.S. deputy marshals traveling through Indian Territory on business for the Van Buren Federal Court. Reeves got his start as a deputy when the Federal Western District Court was moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas. Isaac C. Parker was appointed Court Judge and one of his first official acts was to appoint U.S. Marshal James F. Fagan as head deputy of around 200 deputies he was assigned to hire. Fagan heard of Reeves’s knowledge of the territory and his ability to speak several tribal languages and soon recruited him as a U.S. deputy in 1875.

Reeves worked with other lawmen and covered more than 75,000 square miles of Oklahoma land in search of outlaws. Despite his illiteracy, Reeves was able to correctly apprehend criminals by having someone else read to him arrest warrants. Reeves would then memorize the contents of these warrants and was able to accurately discern which warrants were the correct ones. One of his most famous criminal apprehensions was that of notorious outlaw Bob Dozier. Dozier was known as a cunning and elusive criminal that was able to slip through the hands of many law enforcement officers. Reeves was unable to catch Dozier for several months until he was able to track him down and kill him in a gunfight in Cherokee nation in 1878 after Dozier refused to surrender.

Reeves’s exploits led him to apprehend more than 3,000 outlaws (including his own son) during his 35 years as a deputy marshal. Upon retirement in 1907, Reeves became a city police officer for two years in Muskogee, Oklahoma until his death on January 12th, 1910 at the age of 72. One historian speculates that Bass Reeves’s epic story served as inspiration for the character the Lone Ranger, a lawman in the Old West.

Reeves’s story is one of great valor, strength, cunning and is underscored by a commitment to both duty and justice which has solidified Reeves as one of America’s greatest unsung heroes.

“Maybe the law ain’t perfect, but it’s the only one we got, and without it we got nuthin” - Bass Reeves

02/03/2021

As a continuation of our celebration of Black History Month, we share today the story of Madam C.J. Walker, one of the first Black woman millionaires in America.

Madam C.J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove on December 23rd, 1867 near Delta, Louisiana. One of six children, she was the first child in her family to not be born into slavery after the signage of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. Orphaned at the age of seven, Walker moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi at the age of 10 to be raised by her brother-in-law. Walker’s entrepreneurial journey began when she and her older sister started to work in the cotton fields of Mississippi. Later, she worked as a child domestic servant and only received a total of three months of formal education in her lifetime. In 1888, Walker moved to St. Louis where she found work as a laundress and barely earned a dollar a day. Around 1904, Walker began working for Annie Malone, an African American hair-care entrepreneur, as a commission agent selling hair-care products.

Walker is most known for founding the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. After experiencing hair loss and other scalp issues in the 1890s, Walker began experimenting with various home-remedies and store-bought products to treat her hair condition. Eventually, Walker founded her own business and began selling Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower which was a scalp conditioning and healing formula. She would promote her products by traveling throughout the South and Southeast United States and going door to door demonstrating her scalp treatment product to black women. In 1908, she moved her company headquarters to Pittsburgh where she also opened a college to train others in selling her product. By the early 1910s, Walker had settled in Indianapolis where she built a factory, hair and manicure salon, and another training school. The company also expanded operations to Central America and the Caribbean in 1913. As a result of her company’s success, Walker became one of the first black female self-made millionaires in the United States.

Walker was also a social activist and used her economic status to advocate for the advancement of African Americans through philanthropy. She made numerous philanthropic donations to various organizations and became a patron of the arts. Among these donations were $1,000 to the building fund of the “colored” YMCA in Indianapolis, scholarship funds to the Tuskegee Institute, $5,000 to the NAACP’s anti-lynching movement, and more than $100,000 to orphanages, institutes, and individuals. Walker’s $250,000 mansion in Harlem, Villa Lewaro, served as a social hub for the African American community. Actress Octavia Spencer played a fictionalized depiction of Walker in the Netflix 2020 limited series Self Made that centers on Walker’s rise to millionaire status in the face of racism and capitalist rivalries. Walker died on May 25th, 1919.

Madam C.J Walker’s hard-work, dedication, and entrepreneurship helped to secure her life as one of the most successful rags-to-riches stories in post-Civil War America.

“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations… I have built my own factory on my own ground.” – Madam C.J. Walker

02/02/2021

Happy Black History Month everyone!

We hope that this month will present itself with amazing opportunities to learn about the contributions and achievements of Black figures throughout history and the challenges they overcame in the face of racism, discrimination, and hate.

All this month, we will be sharing informational posts celebrating lesser-known Black figures in history that have nonetheless had a profound impact on the world.

Today we start off with one of the most brilliant minds in NASA's history, Kathrine Johnson.

Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26th, 1918. From an early age, Johnson had a profound brilliance for mathematics, and this propelled her through several grades in school. Because the county Johnson grew up in did not provide public schooling for black students past the eighth grade, Johnson attended high school in Institute, West Virginia. The high school was located on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College where Johnson would eventually enroll at the age of 14. Johnson excelled throughout the mathematics curriculum and graduated summa cm laude in 1937 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics. After a brief stint teaching, Johnson later attended West Virginia University, the first black woman to do so and one of three black students chosen to integrate the graduate school after the 1938 United States Supreme Court ruling Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. This ruling established that states that provided higher education to white students also had to provide it for black students.

Johnson began her career as a research mathematician at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in the Guidance and Navigation Department in 1953 where she analyzed data from flight tests and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. In 1957, she contributed calculations to the 1958 document “Notes on Space Technology” which was a series of lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division. These groups would later merge to form the Space Task Group of NACA which would later become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

She is most famous for her mathematical abilities in solving complex manual calculations and for her critical role in the calculations of orbital mechanics which were used by NASA in trajectory analysis, spacecraft synchronization, emergency return pathing, and space exploration. Her work was essential to the success of Alan Shepard’s 1961 Freedom 7 mission and to John Glenn’s 1962 orbital mission. Her calculations were also used in the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, flights to the Moon, and in plans for missions to Mars. Johnson retired in 1986 after working for 33 years.

Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 by President Barack Obama as well as the Silver Snoopy Award and NASA Group Achievement Award in 2016. She was also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019. Actress Taraji P. Henson played Katherine Johnson in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures which centered around the contributions of three black women in the early years of the NASA space program. Katherine Johnson died on February 24th, 2020 at the age of 101.

The pioneering achievements of Katherine Johnson provide inspiration to the world that no matter your race or s*x, greatness is possible.

“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.” – Katherine Johnson

08/23/2020

08/23/2020

On June 5th, 2020, the USAO community gathered to speak out against police brutality and to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Since that day, the fight has continued against racism and the injustices that it breeds. Many persist in their protests against the unjust murders of African Americans and other people of color and demand change to prevent these injustices from continuing.

Some of these demands have been heard and significant progress has been made in the way of police reform across the country. New legislation and policies have been created at the federal, state, and local levels to tackle the issue:

https://www.axios.com/police-reform-george-floyd-protest-2150b2dd-a6dc-4a0c-a1fb-62c2e999a03a.html

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/criminal-justice/news/2020/07/16/487721/assessing-state-police-reform/

https://www.pump.org/police-reform-whats-happening-locally-statewide-and-nationally/

Although personal accountability is crucial in eradicating racism and preventing its festering, racism still exists as a systemic issue that is present in every aspect of society. As such, racism needs to be addressed with both personal introspection and institutional transformations.

While discussions on racial issues may have seemed to lessen and been overshadowed by other events in the news, it is important to always keep in mind that these issues, and the impacts they have on the lives of many, do not vanish when taken out of the spotlight.

The recent killings of Black people at the hands of police have prompted weeks of protests, with people around the ... Read More

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