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By Dr. Kennda Lynch, Staff Scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and Member of the USRA Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
As we prepare to enter the February month-long celebration of Black History across the United States, I offer a timely moment to pause, remember, and reflect on some of the Black cultural and intellectual icons that we lost in the past few months.
bell hooks (Dr. Gloria Watkins) was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. Born in a small town in Kentucky in 1952, shortly before Brown versus Board of Education arrived at the Supreme Court, she was educated in both racially segregated and integrated schools in the 1960s. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University where she started writing her first book, Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, at the age of 19 and later published while completing her doctorate in English at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Under her pen name of “bell hooks” (borrowed from and paying homage to her maternal grandmother), she was a prolific writer who published over 30 books and a multitude of articles and poems. Her worked addressed the intersectionality of race, capitalism, gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She was transformative in empowering people of all races, classes, and genders to engage in and help shape the ongoing debates about justice and discrimination in America.
Greg Tate was a writer/critic best known for his critiques for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone in the early 1980s where he helped elevate Hip-Hop and Street Art to artistic genera worthy of attention and critical review. Tate was known to be equally generous and exacting in his review of Black artists, but in all he maintained the overall celebration of the Black art and culture.
Robbie Shakespeare was a bass guitarist and half of the Jamaican musical dynamic duo Sly and Robbie who were described by Rolling Stone Magazine as “sonic mad scientists.” Sly and Robbie transcended the spectrum of the music industry from roots in reggae to artist like Grace Jones, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, Sting, Carlos Santana, and even Britney Spears.
Dr. Julius Scott is an American scholar best known for his landmark 1986 dissertation (formally published in 2008), The Common Wind, that studied the flow of communication among African Diasporic communities in the Caribbean during the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) and how this “common wind” communication destabilized and eventually collapsed the slave system.
Dr. Tyler Stoval was an American professor of French history, renowned for his research on race and class, Blackness, postcolonial history, and transnational history of modern France, and the intersection of race and liberty in modern history liberty. Highly respected in his profession he “firmly believed that the writing and teaching of history was a political act” and stated that: “For me, history is the record not only of how things change, but how people make things change, how they act individually and collectively to create a better world.”
Sir Sidney Poitier was an American Actor, film director, diplomat, academy award winner, and honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Poitier was born in Miami, Florida, but grew up in the Bahamas. His distinguished film career would earn acclaim after acclaim for his roles in movies such as Porgy and Bess, Lilies of the Field, A Raisin in the Sun, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night, breaking racial barriers all along the way. In 1963 he became the first African American actor to receive the Academy award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field. Poitier was known to reject roles “based on offensive racial stereotypes” while instead bringing the persona of distinguished and intelligent black men to life on the screen. On a personal note, a piece of Poitier’s work that influenced my life was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, where he plays an intelligent, sophisticated Black widower who falls in love with a young white woman in a time where interracial relationships were not only cultural taboo, but in many places illegal. The movie contends with the social, political, and cultural issues of interracial relationships (and marriage and family); issues that Black people in multicultural relationships (myself included) still grapple with today. Also, Poitier’s elegance, ease, and commanding presence on the screen has always been a source of inspiration for me, as both an accomplished amateur actress (stage theater) and as a science communicator.
These paragraphs are just a fleeting glimpse of these five incredible scholars and artists. For the next month, I’m taking on the challenge to learn of each of these people, their life, their work, and their impact. I challenge and encourage every USRA employee to do the same. Though we have lost these people in physical presence, let’s all strive to ensure that their legacy and impact is never lost.
[Background thumbnail photo courtesy of NASA: Astronaut Photo ISS066-E-86969 (nasa.gov)]
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