Black History Month.....Lewis Latimer

Lewis Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1848. He was the son of George and Rebecca Latimer, escaped slaves from Virginia. When Lewis Latimer was a boy his father George was arrested and tried as a slave fugitive. The judge ordered his return to Virginia and slavery, but money was raised by the local community to pay for George Latimer's freedom. George Latimer later went underground fearing his re-enslavement, a great hardship for the Lewis family.

Patent Draftman

Lewis Latimer enlisted in the Union Navy at the age of 15 by forging the age on his birth certificate. Upon the completion of his military service, Lewis Latimer returned to Boston, Massachusetts where he was employed by the patent solicitors Crosby & Gould. While working in the office Lewis began the study of drafting and eventually became their head draftsmen. During his employment with Crosby & Gould, Latimer drafted the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's patent application for the telephone, spending long nights with the inventor. Bell rushed his patent application to the patent office mere hours ahead of the competition and won the patent rights to the telephone with the help of Latimer.

Working for Hiram Maxim

Hiram S. Maxim (founder of the U.S. Electric Light Company of Bridgeport, CN, and the inventor of the Maxim machine gun) hired Lewis Latimer as an assistant manager and draftsman. Latimer's talent for drafting and his creative genius led him to invent a method of making carbon filaments for the Maxim electric incandescent lamp. In 1881, he supervised the installation of the electric lights in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London.

Working for Thomas Edison

Lewis Latimer was the original draftsman for Thomas Edison (who he started working for in 1884) and as such was the star witness in Edison's infringement suits. Lewis Latimer was the only African American member of the twenty-four "Edison Principles", Thomas Edison's engineering division of the Edison Company. Latimer also co-authored a book on electricity published in 1890 called, "Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System."

In Conclusion

Lewis Latimer had many interests. He was an inventor, draftsman, engineer, author, poet, musician, and, at the same time, a devoted family man and philanthropist. He married Mary Wilson on December 10, 1873. Lewis wrote a poem for his wedding entitled Ebon Venus that was published in his book of poetry, Poems of Love and Life. The Latimers had two daughters, Jeanette and Louise.

Black History Month.....Daniel Hale Williams

Daniel Hale Williams was born on January 18, 1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He was the fifth of seven children born to Daniel and Sarah Williams. Daniel's father was a barber and moved the family to Annapolis, Maryland but died shortly thereafter of tuberculosis. Daniel's mother realized she could not manage the entire family and sent some of the children to live with relatives. Daniel was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore but ran away to join his mother who had moved to Rockford, Illinois. He later moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin where he joined his sister and opened his own barber shop. After moving to nearby Janesville, Daniel became fascinated with a local physician and decided to follow his path. He began working as an apprentice to the physician (Dr. Henry Palmer) for two years and in 1880 entered what is now known as Northwestern University Medical School. After graduation from Northwestern in 1883, he opened his own medical office in Chicago, Illinois.
Because of primitive social and medical circumstances existing in that era, much of Williams early medical practice called for him to treat patients in their homes, including conducting occasional surgeries on kitchen tables. In doing so, Williams utilized many of the emerging antiseptic, sterilization procedures of the day and thereby gained a reputation for professionalism. He was soon appointed as a surgeon on the staff of the South Side Dispensary and then a clinical instructor in anatomy at Northwestern. In 1889 he was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health and one year later set for to create an interracial hospital. On January 23, 1891 Daniel Hale Williams established the Provident Hospital and Training School Association, a three story building which held 12 beds and served members of the community as a whole.
The school also served to train Black nurses and utilized doctors of all races. Within its first year, 189 patients were treated at Provident Hospital and of those 141 saw a complete recovery, 23 had recovered significantly, three had seen change in their condition and 22 had died. For a brand new hospital, at that time, to see an 87% success rate was phenomenal considering the financial and health conditions of the patient, and primitive conditions of most hospitals. Much can be attributed to Williams insistence on the highest standards concerning procedures and sanitary conditions. Two and a half years later, on July 9, 1893, a young Black man named James Cornish was injured in a bar fight, stabbed in the chest with a knife. By the time he was transported to Provident Hospital he was seeking closer and closer to death, having lost a great deal of blood and having gone into shock.
Williams was faced with the choice of opening the man's chest and possibly operating internally when that was almost unheard of in that day in age. Internal operations were unheard of because any entrance into the chest or abdomen of a patient would almost surely bring with it resulting infection and therefore death. Williams made the decision to operate and opened the man's chest. He saw the damage to the man's pericardium (sac surrounding the heart) and sutured it, then applied antiseptic procedures before closing his chest. Fifty one days later, James Cornish walked out of Provident Hospital completely recovered and would go on to live for another fifty years. Unfortunately, Williams was so busy with other matters, he did not bother to document the event and others made claims to have first achieved the feat of performing open heart surgery. Fortunately, local newspapers of the day did spread the news and Williams received the acclaim he deserved. It should be noted however that while he is known as the first person to perform an open heart surgery, it is actually more noteworthy that he was the first surgeon to open the chest cavity successfully without the patient dying of infection. His procedures would therefore be used as standards for future internal surgeries.
In February 1894, Daniel Hale Williams was appointed as Chief Surgeon at the Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C. and reorganized the hospital, creating seven medical and surgical departments, setting up pathological and bacteriological units, establishing a biracial staff of highly qualified doctors and nurses and established an internship program. Recognition of his efforts and their success came when doctors from all over the country traveled to Washington to view the hospital and to sit in on surgery performed there. Almost immediately there was an astounding increase in efficiency as well as a decrease in patient deaths. During this time, Williams married Alice Johnson and the couple soon moved to Chicago after Daniel resigned from the Freedmen's hospital. He resumed his position as Chief Surgeon at Provident Hospital (which could now accommodate 65 patients) as well as for nearby Mercy Hospital and St. Luke's Hospital, an exclusive hospital for wealthy White patients. He was also asked to travel across the country to attend to important patients or to oversee certain procedures.
When the American Medical Association refused to accept Black members, Williams helped to set up and served as Vice-President of the National Medical Association. In 1912, Williams was appointed associate attending surgeon at St. Luke's and worked there until his retirement from the practice of medicine. Upon his retirement, Daniel Hale Williams had bestowed upon him numerous honors and awards. He received honorary degrees from Howard and Wilberforce Universities, was named a charter member of the American College of Surgeons and was a member of the Chicago Surgical Society. Williams died on August 4, 1931, having set standards and examples for surgeons, both Black and White, for years to come.

Black History......Bobby Seale

Robert George Seale (born 1936) was a militant activist who, with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Hutton, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966.

Born to a poor African American carpenter and his wife in Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1936, Robert George (Bobby) Seale and his family moved to Port Arthur, Texas, and then to San Antonio, Texas, before finally settling in Oakland, California, during World War II. Attributing his failure to make the basketball and football teams to racial prejudice, Seale quit Oakland High School and joined the U.S. Air Force. After three years in the Air Force, Seale was court-martialed and given a bad conduct discharge for disobeying a colonel at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota.

Seale returned to Oakland and, while working as a sheet metal mechanic in various aerospace plants, earned his high school diploma through night school. In 1962 he began attending Oakland City College (Merritt College). Seale became aware of the African American struggle for civil rights when he joined the Afro-American Association (AAA), a campus organization that stressed black separatism and self-improvement. Through the AAA he met activist Huey P. Newton in September 1962. Seale and Newton soon became disenchanted with the AAA, however, believing that the organization offered little more than ineffectual cultural nationalism. In their view, this cultural nationalism would not help lessen the economic and political oppression felt in the African American community, especially in the Ghetto. Both greatly admired Malcolm X and were particularly impressed with his teachings. They were especially drawn to the idea that Black people had to defend themselves against white brutality and inaccurate education. The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 pushed them to adopt Malcolm's slogan, "Freedom by any means necessary," and they founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966.

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense

Beginning as an armed patrol dedicated to the defense of Oakland Blacks against the brutality of the city police, the Black Panthers gained local notoriety for their fearlessness and militant demand for Black rights. In 1967 the Black Panther Party (BPP) garnered national attention when it sent an armed contingent to the state capitol in Sacramento to protest a proposed gun-control law and to assert the constitutional right of Blacks to bear arms against their white oppressors. Coupling food programs for needy families and "liberation schools" for political education with defiant calls for Black control of community institutions and for "power to the people," the BPP opened recruitment centers across the nation in 1968. According to J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the BPP had become "the No. 1 threat to the internal security of the nation." Fearful of the growing popularity of the BPP and their insistence that Black Power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Hoover ordered the FBI to employ "hard-hitting counterintelligence measures to cripple the Black Panthers" in November 1968

For their participation in the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Seale was brought to trial with seven white radicals, including Youth International Party founders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, on September 24, 1969. The eight were indicted in a federal court in Chicago under the new anti-riot provision of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal to cross state lines to incite a riot or instruct in the use of riot weapons. Because his attorney, Charles Garry, had just undergone surgery and could not be present, Seale asked for a delay two weeks before his trial. Judge Julius Hoffman refused. Seale then retained William Kunstler, who was representing the other seven defendants. Upon Garry's advice, fired Kunstler and asked to represent himself, which would have given him the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses and present evidence during the trial. However, Judge Hoffman insisted that Kunstler was sufficient representation and proceeded with the trial.

When Seale continued to protest, with repeated outbursts and by refusing to follow courtroom procedure and decorum, Hoffman had him bound and gagged during the trial. On November 5, 1969, the judge sentenced Seale to four years in jail for 16 counts of contempt of court, each of which contributed three months to his sentence. During his prison term Seale was also indicted for ordering the torture and execution of Alex Rackley, former Black Panther suspected of being a government informer. On May 25, 1971, the conspiracy trial ended in a hung jury and the judge ordered all charges dropped against Seale and the other defendants. The following year the federal government suspended the contempt charges and released Seale from prison.

Return to Politics

Seale returned to Oakland to find the BPP decimated by police infiltration, killings, and arrests. At least two dozen Black Panthers had died in gun fights with the police and dozens more had been imprisoned. The BPP had also been rendered impotent by internal disputes in which Black nationalist advocates warred against the program of revolutionary socialism called for by Newton and Seale. In 1973 Seale ran for mayor of Oakland, finishing second out of nine candidates with 43,710 votes to the incumbent's 77,476.

Claiming combat weariness, Seale left Oakland and the Panthers in 1974. In 1978 he published his autobiography, A Lonely Rage, which described the emotional and psychological changes he had undergone as a black activist. His 1970 book, Seize the Time, portrayed the story of the Black Panthers and the political views of Huey Newton. In retrospect, Seale found consolation in Newton's belief that, to move a single grain of sand is to change a world. "We moved a grain of sand and several hills beside," Seale affirmed. "I swear I'm surprised we lived through it."

Throughout the 1980s Seale continued to develop and support organizations dedicated to combating social and political injustices. He still lectures about his past and current experiences struggling for civil rights for African Americans. In 1987 he published Barbeque'n with Bobby, the proceeds from which go to various non-profit social organizations.

Black History Month Begins!!!!!