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Black Kos, Week In Review - The genius of Benjamin Banneker [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-14  

Great scientist and inventors - dopper0189,Black Kos Managing Editor



Benjamin Banneker (1731 – 1806) was an African-American naturalist, mathematician, astronomer, almanac author, landowner, surveyor, and farmer. Banneker had little or no formal education and was largely self-taught. He became known for assisting Major Andrew Ellicott in a survey that established the original borders of the District of Columbia. Banneker's used his self taught knowledge of astronomy to author a commercially successful series of almanacs. He corresponded with Thomas Jefferson on the topics of slavery and racial equality. Abolitionists and advocates of racial equality promoted and praised Banneker's works. Banneker became a folk-hero after his death. Although a fire on the day of Banneker's funeral destroyed many of his papers and belongings, one of his journals and several of his remaining artifacts survived. The names of parks, schools and streets commemorate him and his works, as do other tributes.

Banneker was born on November 9, 1731, in Baltimore County, Maryland, to Mary Banneky, a free black woman, and Robert, a freed slave from Guinea who died in 1759. However there are two conflicting accounts of Banneker's family history.

Banneker himself and his earliest biographers described him as having only African ancestry and none of Banneker's surviving papers describe a white ancestor or identify the name of his grandmother. However, later biographers have contended that Banneker's mother was the child of Molly Welsh, a former white indentured servant, and an African slave named Banneka. The first published description of Molly Welsh was based on interviews with her descendants that took place in 1836, long after the deaths of both Molly and Benjamin. According to that story, Molly purchased Banneka to help establish a farm located near the future site of Ellicott's Mills, Maryland, west of Baltimore. Banneka may have been a member of the Dogon people, who several anthropologists have claimed had an early knowledge of astronomy (see Dogon astronomical beliefs). The name "Bannaker" may have had the same origin as that of Banaka, a small village in the present-day northwestern Liberia that had once participated in the Transatlantic slave trade.

At a young age Banneker met and befriended Peter Heinrich, a (Quakerwho later established a school near the Banneker family farm. (Quakers were leaders in the anti-slavery movement and advocates of racial equality. These accounts state that Heinrich shared his personal library and provided Banneker with his only classroom instruction. At the age of 21, Banneker reportedly completed a wooden clock that struck on the hour. He appears to have modelled his clock from a borrowed pocket watch by carving each piece to scale. The clock continued to work until his death In 1788, a wealthy Quaker, loaned Banneker books and equipment to begin a more formal study of astronomy. During the following year, Banneker sent a group of wealthy Quakers his work calculating a solar eclipse. In 1790, Banneker prepared an ephemeris for 1791, which he hoped would be placed within a published almanac. However, he was unable to find a printer that was willing to publish and distribute the work. In early 1791, U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson asked surveyor Major Andrew Ellicott (a son of Joseph Ellicott and a cousin of George Ellicott) to survey an area that would contain a new federal capital district In February 1791, Ellicott left a surveying team that he had been leading in western New York so that he could begin the district's survey. Ellicott then hired Banneker as a replacement to assist in the initial survey of the federal district's boundaries, advancing him $60 for travel expenses to and from the area. After completing his survey work, using some of his earning Banneker made astronomical calculations that predicted eclipses and planetary conjunctions for inclusion in an almanac and ephemeris for the year of 1792. To aid Banneker in his efforts to have his almanac published, Andrew Ellicott (who had been authoring almanacs and ephemerides of his own since 1780) forwarded Banneker's ephemeris to James Pemberton, the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Pemberton then asked William Waring, a Philadelphia mathematician, and David Rittenhouse the president of the American Philosophical Society, to confirm the accuracy of Banneker's work. Waring endorsed Banneker's work, stating, "I have examined Benjamin Banneker's Almanac for 1792, and am of the Opinion that it well deserves the Acceptance and Encouragement of the Public”. Rittenhouse responded to Pemberton by stating that Banneker's ephemeris "was a very extraordinary performance, considering the Colour of the Author" and that he "had no doubt that the Calculations are sufficiently accurate for the purposes of a common Almanac. .... Every instance of Genius amongst the Negroes is worthy of attention, because their suppressors seem to lay great stress on their supposed inferior mental abilities." But Banneker replied to Rittenhouse's endorsement by stating: "I am annoyed to find that the subject of my race is so much stressed. The work is either correct or it is not. In this case, I believe it to be perfect.” Never the less Pemberton then made arrangements to print Banneker's almanac. Banneker's Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, for the Year of our Lord, 1792 was the first in a six-year series of almanacs and ephemerides that printers agreed to publish and sell. At least 28 editions of the almanacs, some of which appeared during the same year, were printed in seven cities in five states. The title pages of the Baltimore editions of Banneker's 1792, 1793 and 1794 almanacs and ephemerides stated that the publications contained: the Motions of the Sun and Moon, the True Places and Aspects of the Planets, the Rising and Setting of the Sun, Place and Age of the Moon, &c. – The Lunations, Conjunctions, Eclipses, Judgment of the Weather, Festivals, and other remarkable Days; Days for holding the Supreme and Circuit Courts of the United States, as also the useful Courts in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Also – several useful Tables, and valuable Receipts. – Various Selections from the Commonplace–Book of the Kentucky Philosopher, an American Sage; with interesting and entertaining Essays, in Prose and Verse –the whole comprising a greater, more pleasing, and useful Variety than any Work of the Kind and Price in North America. In addition to the information that its title page described, the 1792 almanac contained a tide table listing the methods for calculating the time of high water at four locations along the Chesapeake Bay (Cape Charles and Point Lookout, Virginia; Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland). Later almanacs contained tables for making such calculations for those locations as well as for Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Halifax and Quebec Canada, among other places. Monthly tables in each edition listed astronomical data and weather predictions for each of the months' dates. A Philadelphia edition of Banneker's 1795 almanac contained a lengthy account of a yellow fever epidemic that had struck that city in 1793. Written by a committee whose president was the city's mayor, Matthew Clarkson, the account related the presumed origins and causes of the epidemic, as well as the extent and duration of the event. A Baltimore edition of Banneker's 1796 almanac contained a table enumerating the population of each U.S. state. The table listed the number of free persons and slaves in each state and the territory according to race and gender, as well as to whether they were above or below the age of 16 years. The almanacs' editors prefaced the publications praising both Banneker and his race. The title pages of two Baltimore editions of Banneker's 1795 almanac had woodcut portraits of him as he may have appeared. Woodcut portrait of Benjamin Bannaker (Banneker) in title page of a Baltimore edition of his 1795 Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac. Banneker's 1792 and 1793 almanacs contained a lengthy commendatory letter that James McHenry self-described friend of Banneker and the Secretary of the 1787 United States Constitutional had written to support the almanac's publication. Benjamin Banneker, a free Negro, has calculated an Almanack, for the ensuing year, 1792, which being desirous to dispose of, to the best advantage, he has requested me to aid his application to you for that purpose. Having fully satisfied myself, in respect to his title to this type of authorship, if you can agree to him for the price of his work, I may venture to assure you it will do you credit, as Editors, while it will afford you the opportunity to encourage talents that have thus far surmounted the most discouraging circumstances and prejudices." In their preface to Banneker's 1792 almanac, the editors of the work wrote that they: feel themselves gratified in the Opportunity of presenting to the Public, through the Medium of their Press, what must be considered as an extraordinary Effort of Genius — a complete and accurate EPHEMERIS for the Year 1792, calculated by a sable Descendant of Africa, .... — They flatter themselves that a philanthropic Public, in this enlightened Era, will be induced to give their Patronage and Support to this Work, not only on Account of its intrinsic Merit, (it having met the Approbation of several of the most distinguished Astronomers in America, particularly the celebrated Mr. Rittenhouse) but from similar Motives to those which induced the Editors to give this Calculation the Preference, the ardent desire of drawing modest Merit from Obscurity, and controverting the long-established illiberal Prejudice against the Blacks.

On 19 August 1791, Banneker composed a letter to Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, in which he included his almanac and an entreaty to uphold the Founder's doctrine that there were truths that were... ... Self evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certan inalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness.”

On 30 August 1791, without directly addressing the charge of inequality, Jefferson replied, ... no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecillity of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them. Jefferson's letter to the Marquis de Condorcet was rather effusive, I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician. I promised him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city on the Patowmac, & in the intervals of his leisure, while on that work, he made an almanac for the next year, which he sent to me in his own handwriting, & which I inclose to you. I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him. add to this that he is a very respectable member of society. he is a free man. I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talent observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends. Three years after Banneker's death though, Jefferson expressed some doubts as to the authenticity of Banneker's abilities, The whole do not amount, in point of evidence, to what we know ourselves of Banneker. We know he had spherical trigonometry enough to make almanacs, but not without the suspicion of aid from Ellicot, who was his neighbor and friend, and never missed an opportunity of puffing him. I have a long letter from Banneker, which shows him to have had a mind of very common stature indeed. Unfortunately like what so frequently happens in the United States even the great Thomas Jefferson, the man of letters, a dignitary of the Renaissance and Liberal Tradition, the author of the doctrine of all men as created equal; doubted that a black man could be equal, that any accomplishment was an exaggeration or a fraud, despite several years of corresponding with and observing Banneker's work. A problem that persist in America to this very day. Sources: Book of the Month: Banneker's Almanac

Wikipedia - Benjamin Banneker

The life of Benjamin Banneker

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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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The rightwing is challenging efforts to bring about racial equity. Slate: The People Who Dismantled Affirmative Action Have a New Strategy to Crush Racial Justice

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Last summer, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down race-conscious admission programs adopted by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina as violations of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. In doing so, the court’s conservative supermajority both ignored that the Framers of the 14th Amendment were the originators of affirmative action and turned a blind eye to entrenched racial inequalities that make a mockery of the constitutional promise of equal citizenship. Now, Edward Blum, who was behind the attack on affirmative action in the SFFA case, and other conservative litigants intent on blocking racial justice efforts have a new strategy: remake the nation’s oldest federal civil rights law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, into a weapon to challenge private efforts to ameliorate systemic racial discrimination and to redress the racial wealth gap.

Last week, in American Alliance for Equal Rights v. Fearless Fund Management, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit became the first federal court of appeals to place its imprimatur on Blum’s new tactic. In a 2–1 ruling, the court of appeals held that Fearless Fund’s grant program to provide capital funding to small businesses run by Black women violated a key federal civil rights statute that dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Known as Section 1981, this law guarantees the equal right to make and enforce contracts.

The court’s opinion, written by Judge Kevin Newsom and joined by Judge Robert Luck, both Donald Trump appointees, held that Fearless Fund’s privately financed effort to rectify the near-total exclusion of Black women from venture capital and ensure that women of color have access to the resources they need to enjoy economic freedom and succeed in business was an unlawful form of racial discrimination. Adopting a strict colorblind reading of Section 1981, Newsom insisted that permitting a grant program open only to Black women “would be anathema to the principles that underlie all antidiscrimination provisions” and preliminarily enjoined its operation.

Newsom’s majority opinion works hard to portray the result as compelled by settled legal principles, but make no mistake, Fearless Fund is a big deal: It perverts a landmark civil rights statute aimed at guaranteeing basic rights of economic citizenship to Black Americans and redressing the long shadow of enslavement, and it creates new barriers to efforts to ensure racial inclusion. Never mind that eradicating racial subordination and guaranteeing economic justice lie at the very core of Section 1981. The two Trump-appointed jurists in the majority effectively read these fundamental precepts out of the statute, holding that Black-owned companies cannot put their own private money into the work of redressing the racial wealth gap and helping to ensure the success of Black-owned companies. According to the court of appeals, Fearless Fund’s grant program must be available to white-owned businesses as well.

The colorblind reading of Section 1981 advanced by Newson’s majority opinion is profoundly antitextual. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was intentionally written in a race-conscious manner. The act declares that citizens “of every race and color … shall have the same right … to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.” Recognizing that enslaved Black Americans never had rights to contract and property—rights essential to equal citizenship—Congress used sweeping language to ensure that persons of “every race and color” would “enjoy” the same economic freedoms as “white citizens.” The statute is not aimed at the use or consideration of race at all; instead, it uses the rights of white citizens as a baseline to guarantee to Black Americans rights of economic citizenship that white citizens have long taken for granted.

Fearless Fund Management

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A new attraction starring the first Black Disney princess is opening at the company’s U.S. theme park resorts, and some Disney followers see it as a fitting replacement to a former ride based on a movie that contained racist tropes.

The new theme park attraction updates Tiana’s storyline from the 2009 animated film “The Princess and the Frog” and is opening this year in the space previously occupied by Splash Mountain. The water ride had been themed to “Song of the South,” a 1946 Disney movie filled with racist cliches about African Americans and plantation life.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure keeps Splash Mountain’s DNA as a log-flume ride, but it’s infused with music, scenery and animatronic characters inspired by “Princess,” set in 1920s New Orleans. It opens to the public later this month at Walt Disney World in Florida and at Disneyland in California later this year.

“For little Black girls, Tiana has meant a lot. When a little child can see somebody who looks like them, that matters,” said Neal Lester, an English professor at Arizona State University, who has written about Tiana.

Disney’s announcement that it would transform its longstanding Splash Mountain ride into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure was made in June 2020 following the social justice protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. At the time, Disney said the change had already been in the works. But it came as companies across the U.S. were reconsidering or renaming decades-old brands amid worldwide protests.

The “Song of the South” film is a mix of live action, cartoons and music featuring an older Black man who works at a plantation and tells fables about talking animals to a white city boy. The film has been criticized for its racist stereotypes, hasn’t been released in theaters in decades and isn’t available on the company’s streaming service Disney+.

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What is a meme? There’s the colloquial definition: an out-of-context image or video, disseminated as a collective in-joke. These memes contribute to the effect that Russell describes in her book. But Russell is talking more broadly about the “meme,” defined simply as an image spread around with increasing variations, a “self-replicating chunk of information,” as linguist Kirby Conrod has explained.

A “dawning digital culture” has drawn heavily on memes, and accordingly it “has been driven by, shaped by, authored by, Blackness,” Russell argues. The “Black meme”—the sassy reaction GIF, the funny viral video, the body camera footage displaying a real-time murder—functions as “both a trope and a trap,” aiding in the ongoing dehumanization of Black people and co-optation of Black culture in a new social context.

Russell’s story begins, however, long before the first dial-up connection. The first Black meme she examines is the lynching postcard, the early twentieth-century practice of spreading grisly images of white families gathering around grills and picnics as Black bodies hung on trees. These cards didn’t just memorialize the event, she writes, but “became a viral advertisement for violence,” a “memetic transmission of social and corporeal death.”

She sees the same gruesome dynamic in the wake of Emmett Till’s murder in 1955: Black pain, white profit. While most know the story of Emmett Till, fewer are aware of the micro-economy that sprung up after Jet published its infamous casket photo. Till’s murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, received $4,000 from an interview with Look magazine. The family of a white juror in the 1955 trial, which acquitted Till’s murderers, has since come to own the site where Till was accused of whistling at a white woman, aided with funding from the Mississippi state government, and in 2018 the family refused to sell the site for less than $4 million. Even as recently as 2017, white American artist Dana Schutz debuted an abstract painting of Till’s casket photo at the Whitney Biennial, to the chagrin of many Black artists and spectators.

Russell traces a pattern from Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012. Violence inflicted on protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge created a national spectacle that “advanced and cultivated empathy across the nation,” Russell writes; yet it also served as a precursor to the “voyeurism and extractive violence of mass media,” as images of state violence waft through our social media feeds and can be shorn of context, made to mean whatever the person posting wants them to mean. This vulnerability is no more apparent than in the murder of Trayvon Martin, which sparked not just national protests against police violence but a sinister viral trend called “Trayvonning.” Viral Blackness objectifies its subject, rendering them an image, an item, a concept, or a joke. “Black life in precarity, a gross commodity for sale, sells cheap but travels fast,” Russell writes.

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Stephen Kwikiriza is one of 11 campaigners against EACOP targeted by authorities in past two weeks, rights group says. The Guardian: Ugandan oil pipeline protester allegedly beaten as part of ‘alarming crackdown’

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A man campaigning against the controversial $5bn (£4bn) east African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) is recovering in hospital after an alleged beating by the Ugandan armed forces in the latest incident in what has been called an “alarming crackdown” on the country’s environmentalists.

Stephen Kwikiriza, who works for Uganda’s Environment Governance Institute (EGI), a non-profit organisation, was abducted in Kampala on 4 June, according to his employer. He was beaten, questioned and then abandoned hundreds of miles from the capital on Sunday evening.

In a post on X, the EGI said: “Stephen was found abandoned on the side of the road last night in Kyenjoyo. Thankfully, he is alive, safe.

“Unfortunately, he is in poor condition after enduring severe beatings, mistreatment, and abuse throughout the week,” the environmental organisation said. “Doctors are conducting various examinations.”

The Uganda People’s Defence Force denied it was responsible and accused Kwikiriza of faking his abduction. Col Deo Akiiki, the military’s deputy spokesperson, said: “It has been established that the said person is totally deceiving. All facts have been established. We are in touch with police and his organisation to know his intentions of telling such lies.”

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The family of the late Gabby Petito, whose sudden disappearance and murder at the hands of her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, dominated headlines in 2021, will be the first to tell you all missing individuals in this country deserve that kind of attention.

They feel so strongly about this, in fact, they are lending their platform to the Black and Missing Foundation, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Relatives, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline to bolster their efforts. “There’s a hierarchy when it comes to missing person fliers being shared,” Joe Petito, Gabby’s father, told People magazine. “Kids go first, then White women and then women of color.” Joe said he was initially offended by the phrase “Missing White Woman Syndrome” when he heard it in reference to his daughter. However, he soon realized the inequity it brings attention to. “We want to help all missing people,” Joe continued. “If the media doesn’t continue doing this for all the people then that’s a shame because it’s not just Gabby that deserved that.” Via email, Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, told theGrio that, from donating $15,000 in 2023 to currently leveraging their platform, The Gabby Petito Foundation has been “instrumental” in supporting their mission.

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