Black History Month

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• Black History Month

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February is Black History Month
an opportunity to celebrate the huge and positive
contribution that black and minority ethnic
communities have made to societies across the
globe and throughout the centuries.
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What is Black History Month?

• Black History Month was the brainchild of Carter
• Woodson who was born in Virginia in 1875.
• The son of former slaves, Woodson was
• able to transcend the poverty of his childhood
• through his intellectual and academic
  achievements
• becoming Dean at Howard University in
• Washington.
• Woodson recognised that black accomplishments
• were ignored in standard history textbooks, and
• sought to bolster a wider knowledge of black
• achievement.

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Black History Month
Carter G Woodson The Father of Black History
Month
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Those who have no record of what their forebears
have accomplished...

Lose the inspiration that comes from the teaching
of history. Carter G. Woodson
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The Scientists
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Edward Bouchet

• Bouchet studied graduate physics at Yale, where
  he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1876. Bouchet was the
  first African American to earn a doctorate degree
  from an American university.

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Benjamin Banneker

• Banneker taught himself astronomy and advanced
  mathematics.
• Working largely alone, with few visitors, he
  compiled results which he published in his
  Almanac.

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Katherine Johnson

• Katherine G. Johnson has worked for NASA with
  the tracking teams of manned and unmanned orbital
  missions. Ms. Johnson is an Aerospace
  Technologist at the National Aeronautics and
  Space Administration's Langley Research Centre,
  Hampton, Virginia. Trained as a mathematician and
  physicist in West Virginia, she has worked on
  challenging problems of interplanetary
  trajectories, space navigation, and the orbits of
  spacecraft.

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Ernest Wilkins Jr.

• This scientists primary achievement has been
  the development of radiation shielding against
  gamma radiation, emitted during electron decay of
  the Sun and other nuclear sources. He developed
  mathematical models by which the amount of gamma
  radiation absorbed by a given material can be
  calculated. This technique of calculating
  radioactive absorption is widely used among
  researcher in space and nuclear science projects.
  

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Meredith Gourdine

• Responsible for the engineering technique termed
  Incineraid for aiding in the removal of smoke
  from buildings. His work on gas dispersion
  developed techniques for dispersing fog from
  airport runways

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Ruth Ella Moore

• Ruth Ella Moore was born in 1903. She received a
  Ph.D. in Bacteriology from Ohio State University
  in 1933 becoming the first black female to earn a
  Ph.D. in Bacteriology.

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Reva K. Williams

• Dr. Reva Kay Williams is the first person to
  successfully work out the Penrose Mechanism to
  extract energy from a black hole. She is the
  first African-American female Ph.D in
  Astrophysics.

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Earnest Coleman

• Dr. Coleman has received recognition for his
  contributions to the education of students in
  physics, particularly disadvantaged students, and
  for his contributions to the field of physics
  research and its applications to physics
  education.

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Mae Jemison The First Black Woman Astronaut

• Astronauts aren't born they go to school and
  learn about science just like everyone else! Dr.
  Mae Jemison's curiosity and energy led her to
  learn about many things. In college, Mae studied
  the physical and social sciences, and learned to
  speak Russian and the African language Swahili.
  She earned a degree in chemical engineering and
  African studies. After college, she studied
  medicine for four years, and became a medical
  doctor. In 1987, Mae was accepted into NASA's
  astronaut program. When the space shuttle
  Endeavour launched into orbit in 1992, Mae became
  the first Black woman to orbit the earth. Mae
  looked down from the shuttle and saw Chicago. She
  remembered visiting the library, making science
  fair projects, and dancing. "I felt like I
  belonged right there in space," she remembers. "I
  realized I would feel comfortable anywhere in the
  universe because I belonged to and was a part
  of it, as much as any star, planet, asteroid,
  comet, or nebula."

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Percy Lavonn Julian

• Percy Lavonn Julian (April 11, 1899 April 19,
  1975) was an African American research chemist
  and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of
  medicinal drugs from plants. He was the first to
  synthesize the natural product physostigmine and
  was a pioneer in the industrial large-scale
  chemical synthesis of the human hormones,
  steroids, progesterone, and testosterone, from
  plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol.

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Click on the link for the worksheet

• www.jpsaos.com/pittenger/PPT/blackhistorymonth.pdf