Black History Month 2023: Focusing on the contributions of Black people in STEM

Educators, research scientists, and college administrators have all called for a new commitment to diversity in the sciences, but most universities struggle to truly support black students in science. As Marybeth Gasman and Thai-Huy Nguyen show, a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have proven remarkably adept at helping their students achieve in the sciences-and there is a lot to be learned from them. Making Black Scientists reveals the secrets to their striking successes and offers a bold new agenda for all colleges and universities that want to better serve their black students. Gasman and Nguyen investigate ten innovative schools across the country that have succeeded at increasing the number of black students studying science and improving their performance. Teachers on these campuses have a keen sense of their students' backgrounds and circumstances. And this familiarity with the specific challenges that their students face allows them to avoid the high rates of attrition that plague so many science departments. Their commitment to encouraging black achievement has often borne fruit. The most effective science programs at HBCUs emphasize teaching over research in hiring and promotions and encourage collaboration over competition among students. Finally, HBCUs offer more opportunities for black students to find role models among both professors and peers. Making Black Scientists makes the case that key pieces of this model can be successfully adapted at other schools and offers a blueprint that points the way toward a new, more inclusive future for science education.

Beyond Banneker demonstrates how mathematics success is fostered among Blacks by mathematicians, mathematics educators, teachers, parents, and others, a story that has been largely overlooked by the profession and research community. Based on archival research and in-depth interviews with thirty mathematicians, this important and timely book vividly captures important narratives about mathematics teaching and learning in multiple contexts, as well as the unique historical and contemporary settings related to race, opportunity, and excellence that Black mathematicians experience. Walker draws upon these narratives to suggest ways to capitalize on the power and potential of underserved communities to respond to the national imperative for developing math success for new generations of young people.

The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty. We Could Not Fail tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of how shooting for the stars helped to overcome segregation on earth. Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights. They recount how these technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and an astronaut candidate surmounted barriers to move, in some cases literally, from the cotton fields to the launching pad. The authors vividly describe what it was like to be the sole African American in a NASA work group and how these brave and determined men also helped to transform Southern society by integrating colleges, patenting new inventions, holding elective office, and reviving and governing defunct towns. Adding new names to the roster of civil rights heroes and a new chapter to the story of space exploration, We Could Not Fail demonstrates how African Americans broke the color barrier by competing successfully at the highest level of American intellectual and technological achievement.

Born in Carthage, North Carolina, Lucean Arthur Headen (1879-1957) grew up amid former slave artisans. Inspired by his grandfather, a wheelwright, and great-uncle, a toolmaker, he dreamed as a child of becoming an inventor. His ambitions suffered the menace of Jim Crow and the reality of a new inventive landscape in which investment was shifting from lone inventors to the new 'industrial scientists.' But determined and ambitious, Headen left the South, and after toiling for a decade as a Pullman porter, risked everything to pursue his dream. He eventually earned eleven patents, most for innovative engine designs and anti-icing methods for aircraft. An equally capable entrepreneur and sportsman, Headen learned to fly in 1911, manufactured his own 'Pace Setter' and 'Headen Special' cars in the early 1920s, and founded the first national black auto racing association in 1924, all establishing him as an important authority on transportation technologies among African Americans. Emigrating to England in 1931, Headen also proved a successful manufacturer, operating engineering firms in Surrey that distributed his motor and other products worldwide for twenty-five years. Though Headen left few personal records, Jill D. Snider recreates the life of this extraordinary man through historical detective work in newspapers, business and trade publications, genealogical databases, and scholarly works.

At a time when popular solutions to the educational plight of poor children of color are imposed from the outside-national standards, high-stakes tests, charismatic individual saviors-the acclaimed Algebra Project and its founder, Robert Moses, offer a vision of school reform based in the power of communities. Begun in 1982, the Algebra Project is transforming math education in twenty-five cities. Founded on the belief that math-science literacy is a prerequisite for full citizenship in society, the Project works with entire communities-parents, teachers, and especially students-to create a culture of literacy around algebra, a crucial stepping-stone to college math and opportunity. Telling the story of this remarkable program, Robert Moses draws on lessons from the 1960s Southern voter registration he famously helped organize: 'Everyone said sharecroppers didn't want to vote. It wasn't until we got them demanding to vote that we got attention. Today, when kids are falling wholesale through the cracks, people say they don't want to learn. We have to get the kids themselves to demand what everyone says they don't want.' We see the Algebra Project organizing community by community. Older kids serve as coaches for younger students and build a self-sustained tradition of leadership. Teachers use innovative techniques. And we see the remarkable success stories of schools like the predominately poor Hart School in Bessemer, Alabama, which outscored the city's middle-class flagship school in just three years. Radical Equations provides a model for anyone looking for a community-based solution to the problems of our disadvantaged schools.

Wangari Muta Maathai is one of Africa's most celebrated female activists. Originally trained as a scientist abroad, Professor Maathai returned to her home country of Kenya with a renewed political consciousness. There, she began her long career as an activist, campaigning for environmental and social justice while speaking out against government corruption. In 2004, Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership of the Green Belt Movement, a conservation effort that resulted in the restoration of African forests decimated during the colonial era. In this biography, Tabitha Kanogo follows Wangari Maathai from her modest, small-town Kenyan upbringing to her rise as a national figure campaigning for environmental and ecological conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty until her death in 2011.

This book offers a new history of race and science in the nineteenth century through the lens of early African American literature, visual culture, and performance. Across five chapters, the book traces the experiments of black writers, artists, performers, and largely self-taught scientists who crafted sophisticated critiques of antebellum racial science and its effects on society. Far from rejecting science, these figures linked natural science to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of worldmaking. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, the book seeks to make natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature.

Hidden Human Computers discusses how in the 1950s, black women made critical contributions to NASA by performing calculations that made it possible for the nation's astronauts to fly into space and return safely to Earth. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards.

Carver had a truly prolific career dedicated to studying the ways in which people ought to interact with the natural world, yet much of his work has been largely forgotten. Hersey rectifies this by tracing the evolution of Carver's agricultural and environmental thought starting with his childhood in Missouri and Kansas and his education at the Iowa Agricultural College. Carver's environmental vision came into focus when he moved to the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, where his sensibilities and training collided with the denuded agrosystems, deep poverty, and institutional racism of the Black Belt.

Award-winning author Tonya Bolden explores the black women who have changed the world of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in America. Including groundbreaking computer scientists, doctors, inventors, physicists, pharmacists, mathematicians, aviators, and many more, this book celebrates over 50 women who have shattered the glass ceiling, defied racial discrimination, and pioneered in their fields. In these profiles, young readers will find role models, inspirations, and maybe even reasons to be the STEM leaders of tomorrow.

For much of America's history, African Americans were discouraged or aggressively prevented from becoming scientists and engineers. Those who did enter STEM fields found that their inventions and discoveries were often neither recognized nor valued. Even today, particularly in the field of engineering, the participation of African American men and women is shockingly low, and some evidence indicates that the situation might be getting worse. In Changing the Face of Engineering, twenty-four eminent scholars address the underrepresentation of African Americans in engineering from a wide variety of disciplinary and professional perspectives while proposing workable classroom solutions and public policy initiatives. They combine robust statistical analyses with personal narratives of African American engineers and STEM instructors who, by taking evidenced-based approaches, have found success in graduating African American engineers. Changing the Face of Engineering argues that the continued underrepresentation of African Americans in engineering impairs the ability of the United States to compete successfully in the global marketplace.

Edward A. Bouchet was the first African-American to receive the doctorate in any field of knowledge in the United States and that area was physics. He was granted the degree in 1876 from Yale University making him at that time one of the few persons to hold the physics doctorate from an American university. Bouchet played a significant role in the education of African-Americans during the last quarter of the 19th century through his teaching and mentoring activities at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was one among a small number of African-Americans who achieved advanced training and education within decades of the American civil war. These people provided direction, leadership, and role models for what eventually became the civil/human rights movements.

Wangari Muta Maathai was a scholar-activist known for founding the Green Belt Movement, an environmental campaign that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. While many studies of Maathai highlight her activism, few examine Maathai as a scholar whose contributions to various disciplines and causes spanned more than three decades. In 'Radical Utu : Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai', Besi Brillian Muhonja presents the words and works of Maathai as theoretical concepts attesting to her contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges. Muhonja's well-rounded portrait of Maathai's ideas offers a corrective to the one-dimensional characterization of Maathai typical of other works.

Beginning with Dr. Marie Maynard Daly, the first African American woman to receive a PhD in chemistry in the United States--in 1947, from Columbia University--this well researched and fascinating book celebrate the lives and history of African American women chemists. Written by Jeannette Brown, an African American chemist herself, the book profiles the lives of numerous women, ranging from the earliest pioneers up until the late 1960's when the Civil Rights Acts sparked greater career opportunities. Brown examines each woman's motivation to pursue chemistry, describes their struggles to obtain an education and their efforts to succeed in a field in which there were few African American men, much less African American women, and details their often quite significant accomplishments. The book looks at chemists in academia, industry, and government, as well as chemical engineers, whose career path is very different from that of the tradition chemist, and it concludes with a chapter on the future of African American women chemists, which will be of interest to all women interested in a career in science.

Women of Color in STEM: Navigating the Workforce is an opportunity for making public the life stories of women of color who have persevered in STEM workplace settings. The authors used various critical theories to situate and make visible the lives of women of color in such disciplines and workplace contexts like mathematics, science, engineering, NASA, academia, government agencies, and others. They skillfully centered women and their experiences at the intersection of their identity dimensions of race, class, gender, and their respective discipline. While the disciplines and career contexts vary, the oppression, alienation, and social inequities were common realities for all. Despite the challenges, the women were resilient and persevered with tenacity, a strong sense of self as a person of color, and reliance on family, community, mentors, and spirituality. While we celebrated the successes, it is critical that organizational leaders, whether in education or other workplace settings, draw from narratives and counter-narratives of these women to improve the organizational climate where individuals can thrive, despite their racial, class and gender identity. This book will assist educational communities, professional communities, and families to understand their roles and responsibilities in increasing the number of women of color in STEM.

After the scholars profiled in African-American pioneers in anthropology, a second generation of African American anthropologists trained in the late 1950s and 1960s. Expected to study their own or similar cultures, these specialists often focused on the African diaspora but in some cases ranged farther afield both geographically and intellectually. Yet their work remains largely unknown to colleagues and students. This volume collects intellectual biographies of fifteen accomplished African American anthropologists of the era. The authors explore the scholars' diverse backgrounds and interests and look at their groundbreaking methodologies, ethnographies, and theories. They also place their subjects within their tumultuous times, when antiracism and anticolonialism transformed the field and the emergence of ideas around racial vindication brought forth new worldviews.

Women scientists have made key contributions to the pursuit of science and some of the most important discoveries of all time. In Mae Carol Jemison, learn how the American astronaut and doctor chose to pursue a career in science and became the first African-American woman in space, followed by work advocating for space exploration and women and minorities in the sciences.

Ernest Everett Just was not like other scientists of his time. He saw the whole, where others saw only parts. He noticed details others failed to see. He persisted in his research despite the discrimination and limitations imposed on him as an African American. His keen observations of sea creatures revealed new insights about egg cells and the origins of life. Through stunning illustrations and lyrical prose, this picture book presents the life and accomplishments of this long overlooked scientific pioneer.

As Africa and its diaspora commemorate fifty years of post-independence Pan-Africanism, this unique and provocative collection of biographical essays provides insight into the thirteen prominent individuals of African descent who have won the Nobel Peace Prize since 1950. From the first American president of African descent, Barack Obama, to influential figures in peacemaking, Africa's Peacemakers reveals how this remarkable collection of individuals have changed the world - for better or worse.

In the 1950s, NASA relied on human computers. These skilled women did calculations by hand. While astronauts and their accomplishments were well known, human computers often worked behind the scenes.

Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya. Born in a rural village in 1940, she was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her become the first woman both in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government; the establishment, in 1977, of the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages; and how her courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government into the democracy in which she now serves.

When Damon Tweedy first enters the halls of Duke University Medical School on a full scholarship, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. When one of his first professors mistakes him for a maintenance worker, it is a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his early career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than whites." In riveting, honest prose, Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of most health problems in the black community. These elements take on greater meaning when Tweedy finds himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and compassionate book, Tweedy deftly explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the space race, [this book] follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances, and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

The author tells the story of his participation in the voter registration movement in Mississippi in the 1960s, and explains how he used what he learned through his Civil Rights work to establish the Algebra Project, a program dedicated to resolving the crisis in math literacy in poor communities.

Tells the emotional true story of two men who defied the rules of their time to launch a medical revolution, set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow south. Working in 1940s Baltimore on an unprecedented technique for performing heart surgery on "blue babies", Dr. Alfred Blalock and lab technician Vivien Thomas form an impressive team. As Blalock and Thomas invent a new field of medicine, saving thousands of lives in the process, social pressures threaten to undermine their collaboration and tear them apart.