Roberto Clemente

Roberto Clemente (1934-1972), Puerto Rican baseball player and humanitarian. Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker was born in the Puerto Rican city of Carolina, the son of a homemaker and a foreman on a sugar cane plantation. After centuries of exploitation by Spain and then the U.S., his family and most other Puerto Ricans suffered from socioeconomic inequality. This was especially true for blacks. Although slavery had been less widespread and racism was less rigid than on the U.S. mainland, black Puerto Ricans were still firmly implanted at the bottom of society, and many identified as white. In spite of this, his parents instilled a sense of pride as a Puerto Rican of African descent and an unwillingness to accept inequality; as he later recalled, “My mother and father never told me to hate anyone or they never told me to dislike anybody because of race or color.” Clemente showed early promise as a javelin thrower, but his greatest talent was in baseball. Making a bat from a tree branch and a glove from a coffee bean sack, he joined in a professional league at the age of fourteen, and while he was still in high school he began playing with the Cangrejeros de Santurce (“Santurce Crabbers”) of the Puerto Rican Professional Baseball League. Two years later in 1954, he was scouted and signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers. Baseball was the most popular sport in Puerto Rico and other parts of Latin America that had been conquered by the U.S. Many Latin Americans saw the sport as a way to escape from poverty, but this opportunity was more limited for those of African descent. Major League Baseball banned black players, and so while black and white players competed together in the integrated leagues of Latin America, in the U.S. white Latinos were able to join MLB while Afro-Latin players competed in the Negro Leagues. When Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, this also created new opportunities for Afro-Latin players. Of the sixteen men who were the first black players on each Major League team, four were from Latin America.

After playing one season with the Dodgers’ minor league team in Montreal, Clemente signed a new contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1955. At that time the Pirates were one of the worst franchises in baseball, having finished in last place for three consecutive years. He hit a promising .284 in his first year and in the next became the first player in baseball history to end a game with an inside-the-park grand slam. He gained increasing attention around baseball for his hitting and especially his defense in right field, where his powerful throwing arm enabled him to finish near the top of the league in assists for throwing out baserunners, including one occasion when Ron Santo of the Cubs hit the ball into the right field corner at Wrigley Field and ran around the bases to third, only to find the ball there waiting for him after Clemente had fired it nearly 400 feet. The Pirates team also improved in the late 1950s, enjoying their first winning season in a decade. Finally, in 1960 he was named an All-Star for the first time and the Pirates went to the World Series. Facing the heavily favored Yankees, he got at least one hit in every game, batted .310 overall, and helped the Pirates become baseball champions for the first time since 1925. This was the beginning of a decade of dominance for Clemente. During the 1960s he won four batting titles, got more hits than any other player, won the Gold Glove every year, and was named the Most Valuable Player in 1966, becoming only the second Latinx player to win the latter award. During the off seasons, Clemente served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, played in the Puerto Rican league, and did charity work on his home island, following his oft-stated creed that “If you have the chance to make things better for people coming behind you and you don’t, you are wasting your time on earth."

Despite his many successes, Clemente often struggled with life in Pittsburgh. The city had a large African American population that embraced him but few Spanish speakers, and blue-collar whites were less welcoming despite sharing his class background. Author Richard Peterson, for instance, later recalled that he had been unable to overcome the hostility instilled by his “shot and beer neighborhood defined by its ethnic enclaves, its steel mill mentality and its deep distrust of minorities.” Clemente was often called “Bob” on his baseball cards and by reporters, who also printed his words in a quasi-phonetic style that made him look foolish. After he drove in the winning run in the 1961 All-Star Game, for instance, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran the headline “I GET HEET. I FEEL GOOD” and the words “I jus’ try to sacrifice myself, so I get runner to third if I do, I feel good. But I get heet.” He was also criticized for missing games due to back trouble, which had begun in his rookie season after a drunk driver hit his car. In response, he insisted on being called “Roberto” and became reluctant to speak to reporters, telling one “The farther away you writers stay, the better I like it. You know why? Because you’re trying to create a bad image of me… you do it because I’m black and Puerto Rican, but I’m proud to be Puerto Rican.” This led them to criticize him for being moody, prideful, and lazy, thus invoking stereotypes of the unmotivated black and the emotional Latin American. When the sportswriters voted for Most Valuable Player in 1960, he finished eighth. At the same time, he was a hero in Latin America. When he returned home after the 1961 season, 18,000 people waited at the airport to cheer him. He also inspired many Puerto Ricans to take greater pride in their black heritage, and major league teams began scouting for other Latin American players more heavily, causing a steady increase in their numbers. He embraced his responsibilities as a role model, telling one reporter in his last ever interview that “I am Puerto Rican. I am Black and I am between the walls. So anything that I do first, it would be reflected on me because I’m Black, and second, it would be reflected on me because I am Puerto Rican.”

Clemente also fought for equal rights on multiple fronts. One African American teammate recalled that “Our conversations always stemmed around people from all walks of life being able to get along well, or no excuse why that shouldn’t be…He had a problem with people who treated you differently because of where you were from, your nationality, your color, also poor people…He preached like a Baptist minister. He would say, ‘How can the rich have so much and there are people starving?’ This was his mindset…His spirituality.” The Pirates and other teams held spring training in southern states, where black players were banned from the same hotels and restaurants as their white teammates. The common practice was for white players to eat in the restaurants and then bring food to their black teammates on the bus, but Clemente refused to comply and instead forced the Pirates to get a station wagon for the black players so that they could drive to restaurants that served them. He later said of this protest, “They say, 'Roberto, you better keep your mouth shut because they will ship you back.’ [But] this is something from the first day I said to myself: I am in the minority group. I am from the poor people. I represent the poor people. I represent the common people of America. So I am going to be treated like a human being. I don't want to be treated like a Puerto Rican, or a black, or nothing like that. I want to be treated like any person.” Although his relationship with the white press was unpleasant, black newspapers regularly printed his thoughts on desegregation. In 1962 he attended a speech by Martin Luther King in Puerto Rico and then invited King to his farm to discuss civil rights. Six years later Dr. King was assassinated just before the start of the baseball season. Clemente led his team in voting unanimously that the start of the season should be postponed until after King’s funeral, issuing a statement that read “We are doing this because we respect what Dr. King has done for mankind…Dr. King was not only concerned with Negro or whites but also poor people. We owe this gesture to his memory and his ideals.” This encouraged other teams to make the same decision. His son later summarized all of this by simply stating “[Dad] did not ask to be treated better, he demanded to be treated equally, which is very different.”

In 1970, the Pirates became the first major league team to field an all-black starting lineup, featuring Clemente, a Panamanian, a Cuban, and six African Americans. That year the team also held “Roberto Clemente Night,” during which he was presented with a list of 300,000 signatures gathered in Puerto Rico (this comprised more than ten percent of the island’s total population) and the team donated thousands of dollars to charity. A year later the Pirates won the World Series, again as a heavy underdog. In the World Series Clemente hit .414, made several key defensive plays, and drove in the only runs in the final game with a home run; in a sign of how things had changed since his early career, the pitcher who gave up the home run was a fellow Afro-Latin. He was named World Series Most Valuable Player, the first Latinx player so honored, and in postgame interviews he responded to reporters’ questions in Spanish before switching to English. In 1972 he battled through numerous injuries before getting his 3,000^th hit near the end of the season, becoming only the eleventh player to ever do so. That turned out to be his last regular season hit. In December 1972 Nicaragua was hit by an earthquake that killed at least 4,000 people, and left hundreds of thousands more injured, homeless, and in danger of starvation. Clemente sent three planes and a ship carrying food and supplies, but these resources did not reach the people who needed them, and it was rumored that Nicaragua’s dictator was hoarding the donations. Clemente reasoned that if he personally accompanied the next shipment, his presence as one of the world’s most famous Latin Americans would ensure that the donations were distributed properly. He and several family members had premonitions that the flight would not go well, and since Dr. King’s death he had come to believe that he would also not live to an old age, but he insisted on going. He was unaware that the plane he chartered from Carolina had recently suffered engine damage and was carrying 4,000 pounds more than the allowed amount. On the night of December 31, the plane crashed just after takeoff. At the age of thirty-eight Roberto Clemente was dead, along with the four other people on board were killed. His body was never found.

In addition to his 3,000 hits, Clemente had a lifetime batting average of .317, which is the seventh highest of any player in the integration era, the fifth highest of any black player, and the third highest of any Latinx player. He was named to fifteen All-Star teams and won twelve Gold Gloves, the most of any outfielder. He is also ranked seventeenth all time in outfield assists, and every player ranked ahead of him played in the late 1800s or early 1900s when assists were more common. The Pirates retired his No. 21, making him the second player in team history so honored. The journalists who voted for the Baseball Hall of Fame and who had often clashed with him in life now waived the rule that players could not be elected until five years after their retirement. He became the fifth black player and the first Latinx player elected, although his plaque further symbolized their lack of cultural awareness by listing his full name as “Roberto Walker Clemente” rather than “Roberto Clemente Walker.” That same year, the annual award given to the player who “best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement and the individual's contribution to his team" was renamed for him. Recipients of the Roberto Clemente Award have money donated to the charity of their choice and to Roberto Clemente Sports City, which provides recreational activities for children in Carolina. In 2020 the Pirates instituted Roberto Clemente Day, on which every player wore No. 21 and distributed charity to Pittsburghers suffering from the COVID-19 Pandemic. There is also a movement to retire his number around the league, similar to what was done for Jackie Robinson and to recognize his pioneering legacy. In 1956 only 6% of players starting on Opening Day were Latinx, but in 2020 that number had climbed to 37%. Eighteen more Latinx players have won the MVP award, along with fifteen other batting champions, four other members of the 3,000-hit club, nine other World Series MVPs, and fifteen other Hall of Famers. In addition, seven Latinx players have won the Roberto Clemente Award. One of those was his fellow black Puerto Rican Carlos Delgado, who said in 2020 that “It’s incredible when you have a Hall of Famer with not only that trajectory in baseball, but in humanitarianism and his willingness to fight for human rights. He had great pride and integrity as a Black Puerto Rican and Latino, claiming his place in a very, very complicated environment. You look at it now and I can’t even imagine what it was like in the ‘60s to be Black in a clubhouse with mostly white people, with white reporters constantly bothering you, making fun of your accent.” Delgado and others also firmly believe that if Clemente was still alive, he would be a force in the rising wave of social activism. The director of the Roberto Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh, which hung a Black Lives Matter banner on the outside wall, said that “Clemente would have been out there leading these protests,” while Clemente’s son asserted that “I truly believe my Dad would be saying what he always said, ‘We don’t wanna be treated as a Puerto Rican, or as African American, we don’t want to be treated as anything but an equal.’”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Jimmie Lee Jackson

Jimmie Lee Jackson (1938-1965), civil rights activist. Jackson was born in the central Alabama town of Marion, the son of impoverished farmers and the great-grandson of former slaves. He finished high school in a time when most African Americans did not go past elementary school, then served in the military and moved to Indiana. His father's sudden death forced him to return to the South to support his family as a farmer and woodcutter, earning the equivalent of $15,000 a year. His and other African Americans' constitutional right to vote had been created by the 15th amendment shortly after the Civil War but then stolen over the next few decades by a combination of fraud, legal trickery, and violence. Blacks officially retained this right, but those who tried to exercise it were barred from registering and then often fired from their jobs or physically attacked. As a result, fewer than 1% of blacks in the Deep South were registered to vote. Because only registered voters were eligible for jury duty, blacks were almost always tried by all-white juries; this was also true in the rare instances that whites were arrested for crimes against blacks. African Americans were also subjected to a law enforcement system of harassment, unjust arrest, and brutality, while the general public either ignored these actions or blamed the victims. All of this helped keep black Americans in an oppression condition not much different from what they had experienced during slavery.

In the 1950s, though, the Civil Rights Movement began as Jackson and others began risking their lives to press for change. He attended civil rights meetings, took part in boycotts of white businesses that mistreated African Americans, and wrote a letter to a federal judge protesting the denial of voting rights. He tried to register to vote as soon as he turned twenty-one and then every year after that but was turned away each time. He also became the youngest deacon in his church's history. In February 1965, Martin Luther King, C.T. Vivian, John Lewis, Amelia Boyton, and other civil rights leaders came to the nearby town of Selma to help register black voters. They chose this location in part because local sheriff James G. Clark had a violent reputation that was considered brutal even by local standards; on one occasion, for instance, he sucker-punched Vivian in full view of news cameras on the courthouse steps. King hoped, as in Birmingham and other settings, that if white Americans saw images of peaceful protesters being attacked, they would pressure the federal government to support civil rights. On the evening of February 18, Jackson and 500 other people were marching peacefully in Marion when they were suddenly attacked by police officers and vigilantes. Jackson, his mother, and his grandfather were pursued into a cafe, and when he tried to protect his relatives from being beaten, state trooper James Bonard Fowler shot him twice in the stomach at point-blank range. He managed to escape the cafe despite his injuries and while being beaten, and he lay in the street for nearly thirty minutes before being taken to the hospital, where another policeman read an arrest warrant against him for assault and attempted murder of an officer. After lingering in intense pain for eight days, Jimmie Lee Jackson died of an infection in his gunshot wounds. He was twenty-six. At his funeral, King said: "I never will forget as I stood by his bedside a few days ago...how radiantly he responded, how he mentioned the freedom movement and how he talked about the faith that he still had in his God. Like every self-respecting Negro, Jimmie Jackson wanted to be free...He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff who practices lawlessness in the name of law. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician, from governors on down, who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam and cannot protect the rights of its own citizens seeking the right to vote. He was murdered by the indifference of every white minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of his stained-glass windows. And he was murdered by the cowardice of every Negro who passively accepts the evils of segregation and stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice." Jackson was buried next to his father in a cemetery that also held the remains of their enslaved ancestors and with a tombstone that read "He was killed for man's freedom." Government officials falsely claimed that the marchers had attacked the police and refused to even release Fowler's name, and an all-white jury refused to indict Fowler. Jackson's death also inspired many others to keep fighting for civil rights. John Lewis later recalled that "We knew then that his death and his funeral would become the linchpin, the spark, to continue the fight for the right to vote. So, Jimmie Lee Jackson's funeral was very sad, and his death. But he didn't die in vain." Another activist put it more plainly: "We were infuriated to the point where we wanted to carry Jimmie's body to [Governor] George Wallace and dump it on the steps of the capitol."

Over the next few weeks, the protesters attempted to march from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery, fifty-six miles away. Thousands of people took part, including Jackson's grandfather, but they were thwarted by court orders and further violence. John Lewis' skull was fractured by an officer's nightstick. Amelia Boynton was teargassed and beaten unconscious by another officer on horseback. Two white activists were murdered, and their deaths received much more attention from the media and the government than Jackson's had. Federal officials were finally sent to protect the protesters, and nearly a month after Jackson's murder, 25,000 people marched into Montgomery. All of this helped push public opinion further in support of civil rights. Six months after Jackson died President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had been supported by nearly every member of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, outside the Deep South. This law was designed to protect African Americans' constitutional voting rights by banning the legal trickery that had long been used to deny those rights and by giving the federal government greater supervisory power over elections in certain states. This law had a massive effect on black political power in the South. Within a year, 7,000 African Americans in Selma had registered to vote. The number of elected officials around the country increased from around 1,500 in 1970 to nearly 5,000 in 1980 and 10,500 in 2011; these included John Lewis, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death in 2020. White southern politicians who had long opposed civil rights were now compelled to change their positions or be voted out of office, as was the fate of Sheriff James G. Clark. The increased number of black voters and jurors also meant that many whites who had committed racist crimes during the Civil Rights Movement were finally put on trial. One of these was James Bonard Fowler, who was indicted for murder in 2007 and, despite insisting that Jackson had tried to take his gun and that he had acted in self-defense, pled guilty to manslaughter in 2010. The 77-year-old was sentenced to six months in prison and released after five due to health problems. At the same time, though, most white southerners left the Democratic Party and became Republicans. By the 20th century white southern Republicans remained as opposed to present-day civil rights reforms as their predecessors had been. Tactics like voter ID laws and underfunding of voting centers in predominantly black areas could not fully suppress the black vote, but they did have a significant impact on races like the 2000 presidential election and the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. Jackson's tombstone has been vandalized several times. In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, enabling southern states to enact new laws that have made voting more difficult for likely Democratic voters like the poor, college students, and minorities. A year later Jimmie Lee Jackson was portrayed by rising star Lakeith Stanfield in the Ava Duvernay film Selma. Jackson returned to the public eye again in 2020 as continued voter suppression, police brutality, and other aspects of racial inequality led to massive protests on a scale not seen since the 1960s and as some of those protests were met with a violent law enforcement response not dissimilar to those that had ended his life 55 years earlier.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Rev. Pauli Murray

Rev. Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, activist and priest. Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore. Her mother died when she was three, and her grief-stricken father quickly succumbed to mental illness and was sent to a mental institution, where a white guard taunted him with racial slurs and beat him to death; one of her only memories of him was lying in a casket, his skull “split open like a melon and sewed together loosely with jagged stitches.” She was raised by her aunt and grandparents in Durham. “I had in effect three mothers,” she later recalled, “each trying to impress upon me those traits of character expected…stern devotion to duty, capacity for hard work, industry and thrift, and above all honor and courage in all three things.” Her aunt also accepted her habit of acting like a “little boy-girl,” wearing boy’s clothes and insisting on being called Paul and then Pauli. As a child, she walked long distances to avoid riding in segregated streetcars and developed her reading skills by reading the newspaper to her grandfather, a Civil War veteran who had operated a school for former slaves before going blind. IN high school she served as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, president of the literary society, member of the debate team and basketball team, and valedictorian, She refused to attend a segregated university in the South and instead tried to enroll at Columbia University, but they turned her away because of her gender. She instead sought admission at Hunter College, also in New York, but the inferior quality of her segregated education in North Carolina meant that she had to attend high school in New York for two more years before finally starting college in 1929. The Great Depression shortly thereafter, and Murray was forced to live in tenement buildings, work multiple jobs, and eat so little that she suffered from malnutrition, but she graduated on time four years later while also becoming a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.

By then the Depression had reached its peak, with the unemployment rate for black New Yorkers over fifty percent. Murray worked at several jobs, including the Urban League and a woman’s camp run by the Works Progress Administration. She joined the Communist Party but quickly left because she “found party discipline irksome.” She also struggled with her same-sex, gender nonconforming identity in a time when society had little acceptance for this, suffering frequent mental breakdowns and asking doctors to give her male hormones and to perform surgery. She applied to the University of North Carolina School of Law but was turned away because of her race. In 1940, she was arrested in Petersburg, Virginia for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus, later recalling that the bus was her most hated of all segregated institutions because it “permitted the public humiliation of black people to be carried out in the presence of privileged white spectators, who witnessed our shame in silence or indifference.” Although she hoped that the charge of violating segregation laws would lead to legal action against segregation on interstate buses, Virginia prosecutors avoided this possibility by charging her with disorderly conduct. She spent several days in jail rather than paying the fine and decided to continue her education as a way of fighting for civil rights, later writing that “I felt I needed to have a skill that would enable me to fight more intelligently.” Before that could happen, she became involved in the case of Odell Waller, a Virginia sharecropper who had been sentenced to death by an all-white jury for shooting his landowner in self-defense; Murray helped raise money for his legal defense by giving speeches, and one of the people in the audience was a young attorney named Thurgood Marshall, who encouraged her to apply to Howard University College of Law, the only black law school in the country at that time. On the first day of class a professor remarked that he did not understand why women enrolled in law school at all, and in later semesters her classmates mocked her when she suggested legal strategies for overturning segregation. Nevertheless, she published articles such as “Negroes Are Fed Up”; co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); led protests at segregated Washington D.C. restaurants; and worked in legal defense for the poor. She was also elected to the highest student position in the school and graduated first in her class. Previous Howard law valedictorians were automatically given graduate school fellowships at Harvard, but she was denied this honor because of her gender, and not even a letter from President Franklin Roosevelt could reverse this decision. Harvard’s rejection letter simply stated “You are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School,” to which she replied “Gentlemen, I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements, but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds on this subject. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other?” These experiences helped inspire her term “Jane Crow” to refer to the ways that black women were discriminated against on the grounds of both race and gender. Murray earned a graduate degree from the University of California-Berkeley, then became the first African American deputy attorney general in California. When the United Methodist Church asked her to write a comprehensive, state-by-state analysis of segregation laws, she produced the 746-page work “State’s Laws on Race and Color.” This was quickly used by the NAACP in the Brown v. Board of Education case; Thurgood Marshall called it “the Bible for civil rights lawyers.” The strategy that she had been mocked for in law school was now the cornerstone of the desegregation movement. Murray then worked at a New York law firm but left after several years because she felt isolated as the only African American and one of only three women, taking a teaching position at the new Ghana School of Law.

She returned in the early 1960s and devoted her time to the fight for racial and gender equality. She served on several government commissions, including President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, and wrote articles such as “Jane Crow and the Law,” “The Liberation of Black Women,” and “The Negro Woman and the Quest for Equality,” which criticized sexism in the Civil Rights Movement, including the lack of women speakers at the March on Washington. In her 1965 article “Jane Crow and the Law,” she argued that the Equal Protection Clause in the 14^th Amendment should apply equally to race and gender. This became foundational to the work of women’s rights attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who included Murray as an honorary co-author in her brief for the groundbreaking 1971 Reed v. Reed case. Murray also authored many books, including a family history entitled Proud Shoes. In 1966, she helped to found the National Organization of Women, co-authoring its statement of purpose. A year earlier she had become the first African American to earn a Doctoral of Juridical Science from Yale. She taught and worked as an administrator at Brandeis University, Benedict College, and Ghana University Law School. Despite all of this, her work in the fight for equality was not widely known outside of academic circles because she was a lesbian. One scholar later wrote “The civil rights struggle demanded respectable performances of black manhood and womanhood, particularly from its heroes and heroines, and respectability meant being educated, heterosexual, married and Christian. Murray’s open lesbian relationships and her gender nonconforming identity disrupted the dictates of respectability, making it easier to erase her five decades of important intellectual and political contributions from our broader narrative of civil rights.” Another put this more bluntly: “It was Pauli Murray’s fate to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes.” Even so, her personal life and multiple forms of activism and scholarship helped shape present-day understandings of intersectionality. Her presence at the death of a close friend pushed her to enter the ministry, and in 1977 she became the first black woman ordained as an Episcopalian priest. Her first performance of Communion took place in the same church where her enslaved grandmother had been baptized a century earlier. She served in this capacity until her death in 1985. In 2012, the Episcopal Church gave Pauli Murray its equivalent of sainthood, listing her among people “whose lives have exemplified what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and make a difference in the world.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

George Floyd

George Floyd (1973-2020), ministry leader and security guard.  George Perry Floyd, Jr. was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina but grew up in the Cuney Homes housing project, nicknamed “the Bricks,” in Houston’s Third Ward. He used sports to cope with the poverty and crime of his neighborhood, playing on Yates High School’s varsity basketball team as a freshman and starting at tight end on a football team that made it to the state championship game in 1992. He then became the first of his six siblings to attend college, enrolling at South Florida Community College on a football scholarship, where he was also one of the leading scorers on the basketball team. After two years he transferred to Texas A&M University-Kingsville and played basketball there before leaving school and returning to Houston in 1995. Once back home, he worked as a car customizer. He also became part of the local hip hop scene at a time when southern hip hop was growing in national importance thanks in part to artists like the Geto Boys and DJ Screw, who was best known for his deejaying and production techniques on more than 350 mixtapes. Some of those mixtapes included “Big Floyd,” whose lyrics mostly focused on everyday life in the Third Ward, although in one song he foreshadowed future events with the line “Catch me on the TV nationwide.” In the late 1990s, though, Floyd unfortunately became caught in some of the same problems that had plagued the Third Ward and other underserved black communities for generations. He was arrested nine times between 1997 and 2007 for drug possession, theft, trespass, and aggravated robbery, and he served several years in prison. After being paroled in 2013, he went home with a new resolve to make a positive difference in his community. He became active at with the charity Angel by Nature and the church Resurrection Houston, using his own troubled past to connect to young people in the Bricks. Telling his pastor “The neighborhood need it, the community need it, and if y’all about God’s business, then that’s my business. Whatever y’all need, wherever y’all need to go, tell ‘em Floyd said y’all good,” Floyd connected with Christian rappers and helped the church host basketball tournaments, cookouts, Bible studies, community baptisms, and transporting residents to grocery stories and doctor’s appointments. One fellow church member stated “His faith was a heart for the Third Ward that was radically changed by the gospel,” while his pastor recalled that “George Floyd was a person of peace sent from the Lord that helped the gospel go forward in a place that I never lived in. The platform for us to reach that neighborhood and the hundreds of people we reached through that time and up to now was built on the backs of people like Floyd.” In one Twitter video, Floyd pleaded with young people to end shootings, saying “our young generation is clearly lost…You youngsters just going around just busting guns, in crowds, kids getting killed…Come on home, man. One day it’s going to be you and God; you going up, or you going down?”

In 2014 Floyd moved to Minneapolis as part of a church discipleship program, seeking to expand his ministry in a new urban community. Although Minnesota had a reputation for racial liberalism, it also had a long legacy of racial violence. Minneapolis began as Fort Snelling, a military base created in part to control the Sioux and other local Native Americans. Although slavery was banned in Minnesota, slaveholding military officers were allowed to bring their slaves with them; Dred and Harriet Scott were among those forced to live there. Minnesota was also the site of the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota Sioux men in Mankato in 1862, which was the largest mass execution in U.S. history, and of the 1920 lynching of three black men who had been falsely accused of raping a white teenager. More recently, Rickia Russell, Jamar Clark, Philando Castille, and other African Americans were killed or seriously injured by police in the Minneapolis area despite having posed no threat to the officers who attacked them; meanwhile, a Somali-American officer who killed a white woman was sent to prison. African Americans in Minneapolis were seven times more likely than whites to face violence from police officers, eight times more likely to be arrested for low-level violations such as loitering or using counterfeit money, and ten times more likely to be incarcerated. Some of this happened under the tenure of Minneapolis police union leader Bob Kroll, who has been demoted or suspended several times for excessive use of force, who wears a motorcycle jacket bearing a patch that has been associated with white supremacist groups, and who referred to then-U.S. Congressman and Muslim Keith Ellison as a terrorist. Floyd made a new home in this difficult climate by working as a truck driver, bouncer, and a security guard at the Salvation Army and the El Nuevo Rodeo restaurant/nightclub. One of his co-workers at the latter location was Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer who provided security outside the club while off duty. Although Floyd was well-liked by patrons and co-workers as a “gentle giant” who got along well with everyone and had a knack for defusing difficult situations peacefully, Chauvin earned a reputation for being excessively aggressive with black patrons. The club owner recalled “He would mace everyone instead of apprehending the people who were fighting. He would call backup. The next thing you know, there would be five or six squad cars…I told him, I thought this is unnecessary to be pepper-sprayed. The knee-jerk reaction of being afraid, it seemed overkill,” while one of his co-workers later theorized “I think he was afraid and intimidated” by African Americans.

In early 2020 Floyd lost his job at El Nuevo Rodeo due to COVID-19 shutdowns, and shortly thereafter he contracted the disease himself, although his case was relatively mild and he recovered in several weeks. On 25 May 2020, Floyd tried to buy cigarettes at a grocery store in the predominantly black and Latinx neighborhood of Powerhorn Park. The clerk noticed that the $20 bill he used was counterfeit and called the police when Floyd refused to return the cigarettes. The store owner later said “Most of the times when patrons give us a counterfeit bill they don’t even know it’s fake so when the police are called there is no crime being committed, just want to know where it came from, and that’s usually what takes place.” In this instance, two officers arrived, handcuffed Floyd, and sat him on the sidewalk, where he waited calmly. They then took him to their squad car, and he stated that he was not resisting but did not want to wait in the car because he was claustrophobic. Another car arrived with two more officers, including Derek Chauvin, who assumed command. Chauvin forced Floyd into the car, then pulled him back out, forced him to the ground, and pressed his knee to the back of Floyd’s neck while the other officers helped keep him down. Floyd remained in that position for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. He said “I can’t breathe” sixteen times, complained of being in pain, begged the officer to get off his neck, said “they’re going to kill me,” and called out for his mother in an increasingly weak voice. During the last three he was motionless and had no pulse, but Chauvin remained on his neck, and the officers made no effort to provide emergency medical care. A multiracial crowd of bystanders, including the store owner’s nephew, began filming the incident with their phones and demanded that Chauvin get off Floyd’s neck or at least check his pulse, to which one of the other officers replied “Don’t do drugs,” while Chauvin looked directly into one of the camera phones and maintained his position. the camera while he was being recorded on Floyd’s neck. This continued even after paramedics arrived. The unconscious man was finally taken away in an ambulance and pronounced dead in the emergency room an hour later. The official autopsy said that Floyd died due to cardiac arrests caused by being restrained, while the police issued a statement asserting that Floyd had resisted arrest and that the officers had been attentive to his medical distress. Within a few hours, though, video footage of the killing spread rapidly on social media and numerous news outlets, while Floyd’s family commissioned a second autopsy, which found that asphyxiation was the cause of death.

Police brutality against African Americans has been a problem since the days of slave patrollers and overseers, and in recent years and weeks a number of killings had received public attention, but Floyd’s death provoked an unprecedented international response. The existing climate of racial violence, concern about the COVID-19 Pandemic and the subsequent economic downturn, anger over the policies and comments of U.S. President Donald Trump, and the graphic nature of a video which showed a dying man pleading and gasping for his life while an officer indifferently kneeled on his neck sparked worldwide outrage and activism and forced long-overdue conversations about racial inequality. Hundreds of protests were held in thousands of cities and towns around the world, including many places that had few or no black residents. Some protests escalated into theft and violence, although many of these incidents were caused by opportunists uninvolved in the cause, by counter protesters seeking to disparage the protestors or to attack them, or by law enforcement officials. Protesters in places like France, Australia, Colombia, and Mexico linked Floyd’s murder to their own local history of violence against racial minorities, murals of Floyd were painted on a remnant of the Berlin Wall and in numerous other locations around the world, and Pope Francis proclaimed that “We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life.” A GoFundMe page created to raise money for Floyd’s five children and two grandchildren broke the site’s record for individual donations. Societal norms that previously seemed unchangeable now began rapidly changing. The Black Lives Matter movement had long been criticized by many white Americans for its activism against police brutality, but now it grew in support, with many people saying its slogans or displaying its imagery. NASCAR banned Confederate flags at its races after years of refusing to do so for fear of alienating its conservative white fans, and its only top-level black driver repainted his car with the words “Black Lives Matter.” The National Football League had driven out Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality, but it now stated that players would be allowed to kneel and admitted what it had done to Kaepernick. Statues that celebrated Confederate leaders, Spanish conquistadors, and other people with legacies of racial violence were taken down. Television and movie producers began reconsidering their content that gave inaccurate views of law enforcement. Social media was used to highlight black-owned businesses and black creative voices. Colleges and universities began reexamining their policies in admissions, student life, and curriculum, and at least eight created scholarships in Floyd’s name. Individuals and companies who made insensitive comments in response to Floyd’s death were faced with boycotts, termination, withdrawal of college admission, and other forms of backlash. Chauvin and the three other officers involved in his killing were fired and then charged with murder. The U.S. Congress and various states and cities began considering criminal justice reforms such as: banning knee restraints like the one that Chauvin used; banning no-knock warrants like the one that resulted in Breonna Taylor’s death in Louisville; creating a national database of police officers who engage in misconduct so that they can no longer move from one jurisdiction to another; enabling officers who engage in misconduct to be sued; and generally shifting policies and funding to create a greater emphasis on preventing and solving problems in a non-violent, non-punitive manner. It is also likely that Floyd's murder played a role in the 2020 presidential election, as many independent voters and even some conservatives were offended by Trump's underwhelming response to the killing and by his criticism of and violent reaction to the protests.

When Chauvin's trial began in March 2021, his attorneys argued that Floyd's death was caused by drug use, that Floyd had resisted arrest, and that the officer had been in a vulnerable position because of the nearby crowd. Even many of his fellow officers testified, though, that his actions had been inappropriate, thus breaking the "blue wall of silence" that usually denied justice to victims of police brutality by discouraging officers from criticizing each other. In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, with sentencing to follow in several months. At the time of Chauvin's conviction, the three other officers' trials had not yet begun. President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and numerous other public figures applauded the guilty verdict but also renewed their calls for further justice, especially in light of other high-profile police killings and assaults that took place or were publicized just before the jury rendered its decision. One journalist summarized much of this by writing “His legacy is the rich promise of social reform.” A widely circulated video of Floyd’s six-year-old daughter Gianna sitting on his shoulders before his death summarized the climate even more succinctly: “Daddy changed the world!”

 ©David Brodnax, Sr.

Captain Robert Smalls

Captain Robert Smalls (1839-1915), sailor, businessman, and politician. Robert Smalls was born a slave in Beaufort, a town on Port Royal Island off the coast of South Carolina. At the age of twelve he was sent to Charleston to work as a laborer, starting in a hotel and as a lamplighter but then becoming involved in the maritime industries as a longshoreman, rigger, sailmaker, and wheelman. The latter job made him an expert in piloting boats around the complex and sometimes dangerous waterways of Charleston Harbor. This exposed the tension inherent in southern society: whites justified slavery by stating that blacks were intellectually inferior, but their way of life depended on black expertise in numerous areas. Like thousands of other slaves in urban areas, Smalls was “hired out” to employers and allowed to keep a tiny fraction of the earnings, and he saved this money with the intention of purchasing the freedom of himself and his wife and child. These plans were interrupted in 1860 when South Carolina and eight other southern states seceded from the United States and formed the Confederacy. The Civil War began several months later, and Charleston became one of the most heavily guarded cities in the South due to its location and economic importance. Smalls was forced to work as wheelman on the Confederate ship CSS Planter, a small vessel with the task of delivering troops, supplies, and messages and of laying explosives in the harbor to prevent the advance of the Union Navy only seven miles away. While on the Planter, Smalls developed an elaborate plan to flee Charleston with the ship and the other slaves who worked with him. Around 3:00am on 12 May 1862, while the white officers were asleep ashore, Smalls piloted the ship away, picked up his family members and the relatives of the other crew members at another dock, and sailed towards the Union ships. There were five Confederate forts blocking his path, but he was able to trick them by wearing the captain’s uniform and a hat like the captain’s, by copying the captain’s mannerisms, and by giving the proper signals; the lack of sunlight also concealed his racial identity. Once the Planter was beyond the range of Confederate cannons, he took down the rebel flag and raised a white sheet. A Union sailor later recalled “As she neared us, we looked in vain for the face of a white man…one of the Colored men stepped forward, and taking off his hat, shouted, ‘Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!’”

The Union Navy now had the ship, four cannons, 200 pounds of ammunition, the captain’s book that contained Confederate signals and a map of the explosives in the harbor, and Smalls’ expertise. He and his crew were awarded the prize money traditionally given to people who captured an enemy ship in wartime, although they received far less than what whites typically got in such situations. His actions were widely publicized in the northern press and used by liberals as proof of black intelligence and initiative; many historians believe, for instance, that this helped encourage President Lincoln to finally support the enlistment of black troops in the military. He went on speaking tours throughout the country and became a civilian employee of the military, providing information about the harbor and helping to organize former slaves on Port Royal Island into black regiments. During a trip to Philadelphia he refused to give up his seat on a streetcar to a white passenger, and the publicity from this event helped lead to a statewide legal ban on segregation in public transportation. In 1863 he returned to piloting and served as wheelman on five ships, including his former ship, which was now called the USS Planter. He survived a total of seventeen battles and engagements during the war, including one that caused his ship to sink and another that caused the captain to flee. After he safely steered the Planter to safety during the latter battle, the Navy promoted him to its acting captain, making him the first African American to ever serve at this rank. When Charleston was finally captured in the spring of 1865 shortly before the war ended, he took his ship there for the official raising of the U.S. flag.

After the war Smalls became involved in numerous efforts to help other former slaves. He transported food and supplies on the Planter before settling again in Charleston, where he became literate and purchased his former master’s home and another building that was used as a schoolhouse for black children. He and other black leaders in Charleston opened several businesses, including a general store, a newspaper, and a horse-drawn railroad company. As one of the most prominent of the country’s 180,000 black veterans, he also became involved in politics. The former Confederate states were required to hold conventions to write new state constitutions, and Smalls was one of the delegates selected for South Carolina’s convention in 1868. As a result of this and other conventions throughout the South, black men gained the right to vote and public schools were created. From 1868 to 1874 Smalls served in the South Carolina legislature as a member of the Republican Party, which was then far more liberal on civil rights than the Democratic Party, and he helped pass laws that protected the rights of African Americans. He served as a delegate to five of six Republican National Conventions between 1872 and 1892, and he was also appointed lieutenant-colonel of the South Carolina State Militia, the equivalent of the National Guard, and was later promoted to major general.

In 1874 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing South Carolina’s 5^th Congressional District and later the 7^th. No African Americans had served in Congress before the Civil War, but between 1870 and 1901 twenty-two did. Unlike Smalls, though, most of these men had been born free or gained their freedom before the war, and nearly all were of light complexion; as a dark-skinned man who had freed himself during the war, Smalls’ background was more similar to that of the majority of African Americans. While in Congress he secured funding to improve the Port Royal harbor and introduced measures to create economic opportunities for former slaves and to ban racial discrimination in the military. His congressional career also came, though, and a time when black rights were literally under attack. Terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirts murdered thousands of African Americans for voting, running businesses, or otherwise asserting their rights, and the federal government became increasingly reluctant to intervene. This led to depressed turnout by black voters, which along with electoral fraud enabled white Democrats to retake political office. In 1875 there were eight African Americans in Congress, but by 1887 he was one of only remaining. He managed to stay in office longer than others because his district was so overwhelmingly black that even fraud and violence made it difficult for white Democrats to win there. During the 1876 campaign, for instance, the Red Shirts overran a Republican rally and threatened Smalls’ life, leading him to call election day “a carnival of bloodshed and violence.” He narrowly won anyway, leading the Democrats to attempt to remove him through false accusations bribery. During the 1878 election, the violence became so widespread that one resident of his district wrote “Political times are simply frightful. Men are shot at, hounded down, trapped and held til certain meetings are over and intimidated in every possible way,” and Smalls was defeated.

He retook his seat in 1880, by successfully contesting the election results before Congress on the grounds that voters had been frightened away, and he resumed his efforts to promote economic growth and civil rights, introducing bills to secure debt relief for South Carolinians and ban racial segregation in Washington D.C. restaurants. He chose not to run for reelection in 1886, and in the decade after that two other black men held his seat. They were nearly half of the five black congressmen in the country during the 1890s, but after 1901 there were no more in the South until after the Civil Rights Movement. During that decade southern states wrote new constitutions which legally finished the disenfranchisement that had been started by fraud and violence, and now even districts like Smalls’ would be led by white Democrats. During South Carolina’s constitutional convention in 1895, Smalls declared before the state legislature “My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.” The new constitution was ratified anyway. Smalls’ five terms in Congress made him the longest-serving black congressman until the 1950s. During this same period, Smalls was also stripped of his generalship in the state militia, denied a military pension on the grounds that he had officially been a civilian employee, and denied the rest of the prize money that was owed him for his capture of the Planter; in 1897 Congress finally passed a special act granting him a captain’s pension, and three years later he was given an additional $3,500 in prize money to add to the original $1,500, although this was far short of the estimated $60,000 that his supporters thought was merited.

With elected office no longer an option, the only options still open to black politicians on the federal level were appointed positions such as diplomat and port collector. Smalls served as Collector of Customs for Beaufort from 1890 to 1893 and then from 1897 to 1913, although he lost this job when the Democrats retook the White House in the latter year. Two years later he died of diabetes and malaria, just at the time that the migration of thousands of Africans Americans to northern cities was making it possible for black politicians to again win election to Congress, although now from northern states like Illinois and New York. During World War II the Navy built Camp Robert Smalls as a segregated, all-black sub-facility of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago; the camp thus honored his legacy as a pioneer in the Navy but also contradicted it by imposing racial segregation. A section of South Carolina Highway 170 is also named for him, and in 2007 he became the first African American to have an Army vessel named for him when the USAV Major General Robert Smalls was dedicated. At the dedication ceremony his great-great-grandson stated, “Maj. Gen. Smalls was a renaissance man – an educator, a politician, a soldier, a businessman and a family man, and the Army could not have picked a better person to name this ship after.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Adelaide Tambo

Adelaide Tambo (1929-2007), South African nurse and activist. Adelaide Frances Tshukudu was born near the town of Vereeniging, the daughter of a minister and a domestic servant. Her desire to fight racial oppression began at the age of ten when she saw her grandfather whipped into unconsciousness in the town square; “His brutal and humiliating treatment at the hands of the police,” she later recalled, “was the trigger and deciding factor. I would fight them till the end.” She attended high school and nursing school in Johannesburg, where she joined the debating society and joined the local branch of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, starting as a courier and eventually becoming its chair. In 1956 she and 20,000 other women took part in a march in Pretoria to protest against the pass laws, which required people of color to carry identification stating where they were allowed to work, live, and travel. Several months later, her husband and fellow activist Oliver Tambo was arrested on false charges. The ANC leadership decided that the couple should flee the country “to tell the world about the atrocities of apartheid.” Tambo was reluctant to leave her life and family, particularly elderly relatives for whom she was caring, but she agreed to go after the police shot 69 people during another peaceful protest. In 1960 she moved to London, where she resumed her nursing career and her activism. After an attempted break-in at her home, thought to have been carried out by the South African secret police, she sent her children to boarding school and worked up to twenty hours a day to pay their tuition. When a back injury limited her mobility, she trained as a geriatric nurse and ran a retirement home. “Ma Tambo” also pressured the British government and visiting representatives of other countries to oppose apartheid. One former colleague recalled that “With her commanding personality, sometimes almost intimidating, she had an ability to get results; she knew just about every African and Asian ambassador and was highly regarded by the diplomatic corps.”

Tambo co-founded the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement and the Pan-African Women’s Organisation and also led London-based ANC women’s groups. When an attendee of one meeting suggested that African women should take classes to learn to express themselves properly, Tambo responded: "African women do not need a speakers' study class. They have enough experiences of oppression under apartheid that they can articulate without difficulty." She also provided aid to South African children who fled to London after the police killed hundreds more people in the 1976 Soweto Riots. When apartheid was finally being dismantled in 1990, she returned home, stating “We've come back to a country where there's been no improvement in our people's lives. The future of the country is in our hands. Let's take up the challenge.” She was elected to Parliament in the first ever democratic elections in 1994 and also served as treasurer of the ANC Women’s League. When her term ended in 1999, Tambo focused her energies on providing healthcare to the elderly and to physically challenged children. She began the Adelaide Tambo Trust for the Elderly and advised the South African president on issues that affected the physically challenged. Her numerous awards include the Order of Simon of Cyrene, the highest order given to lay people by the South African Anglican Church and the South African government’s Order of the Baobab; in addition, the Adelaide Tambo School provides education to nearly 400 physically and mentally challenged children in Soweto. Adelaide Tambo died in Johannesburg in 2007 and was buried at Tamboville Cemetery, which had previously been named in honor of her and her husband. The ANC declared that she was “a true heroine of our nation, a daughter of our soil who dedicated her life to the freedom of our people.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Dr. Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Corbett

Dr. Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Corbett (1986- ), viral immunologist. Kizzmekia Shanta Corbett was born and raised in the small North Carolina town of Hurdle Mills, part of a large extended family, and grew up in nearby Hillsborough. She showed high intelligence at a young age, and her mother later remembered her as being “like a little detective, my sweet little, opinionated detective.” Her third-grade teacher encouraged her mother and stepfather to demand that the school district put her in on the most demanding academic track, something they rarely did for black children. While in high school she interned in a research laboratory at the University of North Carolina, where she studied the bacteria that causes scarlet fever and worked with a grad student who later became a department chair at Tuskegee University; “I didn’t even know that this thing called a Ph.D. even really existed,” she later said, “Or, at least I didn’t know what it meant. And so, to have someone going through the graduate school process who was a familiar face – he was a black man from Alabama – really kind of helped me.” She received a full scholarship to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, part of a fellowship program that has produced more African Americans in the medical field than any other predominantly white institution. While in college Corbett studied the pathogenesis (origin and development) of pseudotuberculosis (a bacteria that causes scarlet fever-like conditions), worked as a lab technician and as a biological sciences trainer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), did field work on health outcomes in underserved minority communities, and graduated with a degree in biological sciences and sociology. While interning at the NIH she met the head of the Vaccine Research Center, who asked what she wanted to do with her life, and she answered, “I want your job.” She then earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina in 2014. Her dissertation research included working in Sri Lanka to study how the body produces antibodies to fight dengue fever, a tropical disease spread by mosquitos, and the role that genetics play in this process.

After completing her Ph.D., Corbett became a viral immunologist at the NIH with a focus on viral pathogenesis and host immunity. She gave particular attention to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which collectively infected more than 10,000 people around the world in the early 21^st century. These viruses caused Corbett to begin exploring such diseases due to concern that another one could spread in the future; in her words, “these big, challenging questions remained, along with the fact that it was clear that it could happen again. It was looming out there and just a matter of time.” SARS and MERS are both part of a virus group called coronaviruses, which cause respiratory tract infections and are named for the fact that they physically resemble a solar corona. Some coronaviruses produce conditions such as the common cold and pneumonia, but a new one called SARS-Co-V-2 causes coronavirus disease 2019, also known as COVID-19. This disease is carried in fluids such as saliva and mucus and is spread in two ways: first, by inhaling the droplets that people release when exhaling, talking, sneezing, or coughing; or second, by touching a surface that has been contaminated with those droplets within the last 72 hours and then touching their own eyes, nose, or mouth. Its transmission can be prevented by vigorous and frequent hand washing, maintaining social distance from people outside of one’s household, wearing face masks in public, and keeping one’s unwashed hands away from the face. COVID-19 first spread from bats to humans in China in December 2019 and rapidly spread around the world. As of April 2020 there have been more than 2.4 million confirmed cases, 624,000 recoveries, and 165,000 deaths in 185 different countries. The U.S. currently leads all countries in those categories due in part to a slow response and conflicting messages from the federal government, and more than 41,000 Americans have died. In an effort to stop its spread until a vaccine is developed, much of the global economy and human society in general has partly or completely shut down, with schools and universities switching to online learning, sporting events cancelled or postponed, limited human interaction, heightening of problems such as anxiety and domestic abuse, people in white-collar jobs working remotely from home, and numerous businesses closing and employees losing their jobs. The U.S. currently has the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression in the early 1930s. The disease has also severely affected African Americans due to preexisting social inequalities. Black Americans disproportionately suffer from higher rates of conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and asthma, have less access to health care, live in crowded urban neighborhoods where social distancing is less possible; and work in professions where contact with infected persons is more likely. As a result, for instance, African Americans are 22% of North Carolina’s population but 38% of COVID-19 deaths, while in Chicago they comprise 30% of the population but 68% of deaths.

Despite being only 34 years old, Corbett’s years of experience in studying coronavirus made her the NIH’s choice to lead the efforts to develop a vaccine. She realized that the COVID-19 coronavirus, like other viruses that she had previously explored and all coronaviruses in general, carry a spike protein: a claw-shaped protrusion on the virus surface that invades health human cells and infects them. She and other researchers have developed a genetic code sequence that prompts the body’s immune system to detect this spike protein and prevent it from infecting cells. She anticipates that it will take about two months for a vaccine to be ready for trials, the fastest ever progress in such a case, but widespread vaccination will probably not be available until early 2021. This project has required her to work twenty hours a day, seven days a week. One of her colleagues recently said of her “She’s putting in long, long hours, doing critical, potentially world-altering work,” while another wrote “[She’s] a really quite outstanding, hard-working scientist…Fate has put her in a position to make a huge difference in human health, and it has made a good choice.” As the leader of the research team, Corbett has also frequently been called into the public eye. She has used interviews, Twitter, and other platforms to encourage people to engage in social distancing and hand washing, to reject bigotry towards Asian Americans, and to dismiss false claims of cures. As a Christian she has called on people of faith to avoid spreading the disease by defying quarantine laws and going to church, and as an African American she has worked to address suspicion towards the vaccine effort within the black community, a suspicion rooted in the legacy of medical experiments done on black people and in distrust for President Trump. In March 2020 she was part of the NIH team that welcomed U.S. President Donald Trump to their research facility in an effort to explain their work to him, and photos appear to show that she was the only person in the group not a white male. She has reflected on this work by stating “To be living in this moment where I have the opportunity to work on something that has imminent global importance…it’s just a surreal moment for me.” This profile has also brought racist backlash, with one person tweeting that she should “go back to McDonald’s where you belong” and Fox News criticizing her for noting that Trump’s coronavirus task force consisted largely of white men while also placing the word “lead” in her job description in mocking quotation marks. On a number of occasions, people have insisted on talking to her supervisor rather than to her even after he explains that she is the head of the scientific research team. To this she has said “At some point, you just have to say, ‘I don’t care what they think,’ and just show up and let your work speak for you.” Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, Corbett was involved in numerous efforts to encourage African Americans to consider careers in science; as she said, “My community has held me down. Particularly during this time and previous times as I’ve moved throughout my career trajectory. So, it’s important to me to give back in that way.” Part of this has been her cultural sensibility as a young black woman. She stated in one interview that she would discuss science anywhere from “the trap house to the White House,” and she joked that if she wins the Nobel Prize, the rappers Young Jeezy and DaBaby will perform at the ceremony. She has summarized her identity and her work in this way: “I am Christian. I’m black. I am Southern, I’m an empath. I’m feisty, sassy, and fashionable. That’s kind of how I describe myself. I would say that my role as a scientist is really about my passion and purpose for the world and for giving back to the world.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Sachio Kinugasa

Sachio Kinugasa (1947-2018), Japanese baseball player. Kinugasa was born in Kyoto, the son of a Japanese mother and an African American soldier. His father abandoned the family when he was young, and he spent years studying English in the hopes of traveling to America to meet his father, but that never happened. Like other children of black ancestry born in Japan during and after World war II, Kinugasa suffered racial abuse during his childhood. He turned to sports to escape these problems, initially competing in judo but then shifting to baseball. Inspired by his favorite player, San Francisco Giants star Willie Mays, he twice led his high school to the national championship series before signing with the Hiroshima Carp of the Nippon Professional League, Japan's equivalent of the major leagues. After several years in the minors, he made his major league debut in 1968. Kinugasa initially played first base but then moved to third base, where he won several fielding awards. He also became one of the best home run hitters and base stealers in the league, leading the Carp to five championships between 1975 and 1986 and winning the Most Valuable Player award in 1984. He used a long, aggressive swing that led to many strikeouts and was considered more American than Japanese, but his batting coach refused to tamper with it, saying "Kinugasa wasn't really Japanese, so it couldn't be helped." This statement aptly summarized his treatment in Japanese society. Although people of African ancestry were often mistreated, he became immensely popular with fans, who nicknamed him "Tetsujin" ("iron man") after a comic book robot who in America is known as Gigantor. This name came in honor of his durability. Between 1970 and 1987 he did not miss a single game, playing through broken bones (including a shoulder blade), the flu, and countless strains. On one occasion doctors ordered him not to play after being hit in the back with a pitch, but he took the field anyway, saying "If I had played and swung the bat, the pain in my shoulder would last only an instant. If I had to stay home and watch the game on TV, I'd hurt all over for three hours."

In 1987, Kinugasa broke Lou Gehrig's world record of 2,130 consecutive games played. On the day of the record-breaking game he took the field to thunderous applause, was presented with bouquets by both teams, and bowed to the spectators, saying "I thank God for making it possible for me to play baseball." Although American baseball fans had dismissed another Japanese player for breaking the world home run record, saying that the Japanese league had smaller ballparks and inferior pitching, no one could doubt the validity of Kinugasa's accomplishment, which had taken two years longer than Gehrig's. When he retired in 1987 he not only held that record but was also ranked in the top ten in Japanese history for home runs, hits, and runs batted in; he was also the all-time leader in strikeouts. That same year he received the People's Honour Award, given by the prime minister for excellence in sports and entertainment. After his retirement he wrote newspaper articles on baseball and became a popular sports commentator. In 1996 his world consecutive games record was broken by American player Cal Ripken, Jr. Kinugasa attended the game at which this happened, threw out the first pitch, and told reporters "The point of having records is for new players to come along and break them." He also frequently worked with Ripken in youth baseball clinics in Japan and the U.S. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1996, he was the first player to have his number retired by the Carp, and a baseball stadium in Nagasaki was named after him. His success helped pave the way for African Americans like Cecil Fielder and Leon Lee to become star players in Japan and for the accomplishments of other people of black and Japanese ancestry like tennis star Naomi Osaka and beauty pageant winner Ariana Miyamoto. Sachio Kinugasa died of colon cancer in 2018. One member of the government summarized his legacy by saying, "He performed exactly as one would expect of someone called 'Iron Man'...Because he always worked his utmost to the very end, I feel he truly was an iron man."

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks (1920-51), farmer. Loretta Pleasant was born in Roanoke, Virginia. When she was four her mother died in childbirth, and she and her nine siblings were divided up amongst their relatives, with Loretta going to live with her grandfather on a farm near Clover, Virginia. Loretta grew up in a house that had originally been a slave cabin for her ancestors, pulling tobacco on their farm and as a hired hand for white farmers. She became a mother at the age of fourteen and married several years later. When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, she and her family, like thousands of other African Americans, moved to the Turner Station community near Baltimore to work at a steel plant. Several years later began experiencing severe pain until finally visiting Johns Hopkins Hospital, where in 1951 she was diagnosed with a rapidly growing case of cervical cancer. Johns Hopkins was one of the top hospitals in the country and the only one in the area that treated African Americans, and it also treated the poor whether they could pay or not, but it also secretly used its poor patients for medical research. This included collecting samples from cervical cancer patients with the hopes of growing “immortal” human cells that would continually replicate and thus provide scientists with an inexhaustible supply for experiments. These efforts had always proved unsuccessful until the arrival of Lacks, whose HeLa cells (a shortened version of her name) doubled in number every day. It was later discovered that while the telomere, a string of DNA within each human chromosome, normally shortens each time the cell divides and thus eventually cause the cell to die, Lacks’ cancerous cells contained an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds the telomeres with each division and thus prevents the cells from ever growing old. She underwent radiation treatment that shrank her cancerous tumor but also burned the flesh in her mid-section, leading her to tell relatives, “Lord, it just feels like that blackness be spreading all inside me.” She returned to work in the tobacco fields and continued to raise her family. This included her daughter Elsie, who had suffered from physical and mental challenges since birth and was finally sent to a mental health facility ninety miles away, where Lacks visited once a week. One cousin later recalled that “Hennie made life come alive – being with her was like being with fun. Hennie just loved people. She was a person that could really make the good things come out of you,” while another stated that “Even after she got sick, she never was a person who say ‘I feel bad and I’m going to take it out on you’…But she didn’t seem to understand what was going on. She didn’t want to think she was gonna die.” After several months the cancer returned, spreading even more rapidly than before. As she lay dying in the hospital, her last words were to her cousin: “Don’t you let anything bad happen to them children when I’m gone.” Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 at the age of thirty-one, leaving behind a husband, an infant son, and four other children. With no money for a tombstone, she was buried in an unmarked grave near her mother.

Meanwhile, the HeLa cells that had been taken from Lacks’ body began paying dividends for others. The U.S. was in the midst of a polio epidemic that in 1952 alone killed more than 3,000 people and crippled 21,000 others, but scientist Jonas Salk developed a vaccine and tested it using HeLa cells, and within a few years the disease was eradicated in the U.S. except in isolated communities whose members oppose vaccination. HeLa cells were also used to develop vaccines and/or treatments for herpes, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and equine encephalitis, as well as chemotherapy drugs. Technicians used them to create new methods for freezing cells, while geneticists measured the number of chromosomes in human cells and studied conditions like Down syndrome and Turner syndrome. Other scholars used them to study the effects of nuclear radiation, deep-sea diving, and spaceflight on the human body, and when the U.S. began sending spacecraft beyond the earth’s atmosphere, HeLa cells were on board. They were also used to test products such as glue and cosmetics, they led to advances in the field of bioethics due to new rules on human research, and in 1955 they were the first human cells to be successfully cloned. The HeLa cells used in this research initially came from a lab at Tuskegee University that produced 6 trillion cells every week and distributed them on a non-profit basis while also providing jobs and training to black scientists, but eventually a company called Microbiological Associates took over production and became a multi-billion dollar business. When journalists began wondering about the origin of the HeLa cells, Johns Hopkins stated that they had come from a woman named Helen Lane; other sources said the name was Helen Larson. As a result, Lacks’ family did not learn what was happening for several decades. At that time it was standard procedure that patients did not have to consent to have tissue samples removed from their own bodies and that they had no right to profit from any research developments. The few patients’ rights rules that did exist were often ignored when the patient was poor, black, female, or in Lacks’ case all of the above. When steel production at Sparrows Point declined, the community descended into poverty. Three of Lacks’ children developed tuberculosis due to pollution from the factory. A cousin and his wife moved into the family home and began sexually and physically abusing the children. One of them suffered from anger management problems and was incarcerated multiple times, with his family convinced that his mind had been affected by the cancer that grew in Henrietta’s body while she was pregnant with him. The family could not find Elsie until years after she died in the asylum, having suffered from long-term neglect and abuse. Finally, in the early 1970s concerns about contamination of the HeLa cells led to a reexamination of Lacks’ original sample, and her true name was finally known to the world. One article stated that “It has been estimated that the weight of these cells in the world today exceeds that the American negro from whose cervical tumor they originated. That lady has achieved true immortality, both in the test0tube and in the hearts and minds of scientists the world over, since the value of HeLa cells in research, diagnosis, etc., is inestimable.”

The family still remained unaware until a chance meeting in 1973 between Lacks’ daughter in law and a friend who worked at the National Cancer Institute. When they finally learned the truth they took pride in the fact that Lacks’ cells had helped so many other sick people, believing that this was consistent with her helpful spirit, but they were also angered that they had never been informed or that they lived in poverty while others had grown rich. In a sad irony, some of them suffered from medical conditions that could be treated with medicines and techniques developed through HeLa cell research, but they were too poor to afford the treatments; “It’s not fair,” one son declared, “She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother’s so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?” They also became convinced that the journalists, lawyers, and scam artists who constantly contacted them were trying to further exploit them, and they refused to speak with anyone else about Henrietta until the 2000s when a science writer named Rebecca Skloot won their trust. Skloot’s research led to the 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which went to the top of the bestseller list, and which was made into a 2017 HBO film starring Oprah Winfrey. Lacks’ story also became the subject of the play “HeLa,” several rock songs, a Spanish television series, and an episode of Law & Order. She finally received a headstone, which reads in part “Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.” She posthumously received an honorary doctorate in public service from Morgan State University in Baltimore, and a building and lecture series at Johns Hopkins were named in her honor, as was a health and science high school in Washington State and a planet in the solar asteroid belt. This new awareness did not, however, end the conflict between scientists and Henrietta Lacks’ family. In 2013 researchers published the DNA sequence from the HeLa cells, and the family objected on the grounds that this gave the public access to their genetic information; the conflict was resolved when the National Institutes of Health agreed to give the family some control over access to the information. As of 2020 more than 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells have bene grown, resulting in nearly 11,000 patents, but the only money that the Lacks family has received comes from the proceeds of Skloot’s book. Even so, the son who had suffered from anger issues finally found peace when Johns Hopkins admitted that Henrietta Lacks and her family had been mistreated and explained how her cells had benefitted humanity. He and his relatives also drew strength from the Biblical passage John 11:25-26: “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Dr. Charles Drew

Dr. Charles Drew (1904-1950), scientist. Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington D.C., the son of a school teacher, and was a four-sport star athlete in high school. He won a partial football scholarship to Amherst University in 1922 but also had to wait tables to pay his tuition. Excelling at both athletics and academics, he earned the team MVP award his senior year, ran track, earned a perfect score on his senior chemistry exam, and became a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. After graduation he worked as athletic director, football coach and science professor at Morgan State University for several years to save money for medical school. He attended McGill University in Montreal, then did his internship and residency at several Montreal hospitals and at Howard University, which awarded him a fellowship to complete an additional doctoral degree at Columbia University. In his 1941 dissertation thesis “Banked Blood,” Drew showed that it was possible to separate blood into its components of red blood cells and blood plasma, which could be stored longer and kept safe from contamination. For decades transfusions had been done by quickly transferring blood between two individuals, since the blood coagulated almost immediately after leaving the human body, but thanks to Drew’s research it could now be kept in blood banks. This saved thousands of lives in World War II because blood plasma could be taken to wounded soldiers on the front lines, preventing them from dying of blood loss.

Drew was appointed the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank, where he oversaw the collection and shipment of thousands of liters of blood plasma to the European battlefront in refrigerated “Bloodmobiles” under the Blood for Britain project. He left the Red Cross after only nine months in protest of racist policies, though, after the U.S. military rejected donations from African Americans and insisted that “black blood” and “white blood” be stored separately, even though there was no scientific basis for this and many wounded soldiers died while waiting for “same race blood.” He returned to Howard University as chair of the Department of Surgery, writing numerous articles for scientific journals, becoming a Fellow in the International College of Surgeons and the first black examiner on the American Board of Surgery, and being awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal. In 1950 he was driving near Burlington, North Carolina when his car rolled over, causing fatal internal injuries. An old rumor holds that local white doctors refused to treat him because of his race and that he bled to death on the way to a black hospital, but the other black physicians who were riding with him testified that the white doctors did their best and his injuries were too severe to be healed under any circumstances. Even so, this myth revealed the truth of a hypocritical society that treated blacks as second-class citizens while benefiting from their genius, and to the present day some blood banks around the world refuse donations from people of African descent on the assumption that their blood is “contaminated.” The American Red Cross headquarters and numerous other facilities have been named in Drew’s honor, including the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, and millions of lives have been saved around the world through his research.

©David Brodnax, Sr.