was born on 8 April 1926 in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) to Stanley Allsopp and Eloise Allsopp (née Archer). A brilliant student, in 1937 he won the Centenary Exhibition and Government Scholarship to Queen’s College, one of the premiere schools in Guyana. Due to his exemplary academic performance, his scholarship was renewed to the completion of his tenure there in 1945. His foray into engineering began immediately after leaving school, when he joined the Public Works Department in Guyana as an engineering apprentice, where his primary focus was within the ambit of building and civil engineering. In 1949 Allsopp was awarded a Victory Engineering Scholarship to pursue civil engineering at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London His university life was marked with distinction he was elected president of the Students Union the first student of color to hold that post and editor of the ...
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Liliana Obregón
Albuino Azaredo was elected governor of Brazil's state of Espírito Santo (1991–1995). An Afro-Brazilian engineer and successful businessman, Albuino, along with Alceu Collares of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, became one of the first black governors to be elected in Brazil.
Azeredo ran for governor of Espírito Santo as a member of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT). Election patterns have not indicated that voters in Brazil vote along racial lines, but the PDT has an active and militant tradition of speaking about racial issues as part of its political platform. In 1982, for example, its electoral campaign emphasized its commitment to the black population. In addition, influential black leaders have been prominent members of the PDT, including famous black activist Abdias do Nasciamento.
Espírito Santo's Afro-Brazilian population makes up around half of the state's voters. Azeredo did not base his 1991 campaign ...
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Quito Swan
was born in Pembroke (Middletown), Bermuda, to Joel and Henrietta Browne on 28 November 1932. His major political activities included coordinating the First International Black Power Conference (Bermuda, 1969), and a key role in organizing the Congress of African Peoples (Atlanta, 1970) and Sixth Pan-African Congress (Tanzania, 1974). He was also intensely involved in Bermuda’s suffrage movement, the push for Bermuda’s decolonization through the United Nations, and the island’s black power movement, and served as a parliamentarian for Bermuda’s Progressive Labour Party (PLP). During that time, he changed his name to Pauulu Kamarakafego.
An engineer by trade he fused his political worldviews with his technical work across the Americas Africa Europe Asia and Australasia He obtained a Ph D in ecological engineering from the California Institute of Technology Pioneering the modern sustainable development movement he became an internationally renowned ecological engineer UNESCO consultant on rural development ...
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Jeremy Rich
astrophysicist and politician, was born in Nioro a town in Mali close to the border with Mauritania He was the son of Moussa Diarra a clerk for the French colonial government and a trade unionist who backed the Parti Progressiste Soudanais of Fily Dabo Sissoko The leftist regime of the early 1960s had Moussa Diarra exiled to a town in northern Mali Modibo Diarra and three of his four brothers had remarkable careers later in life Cheick Sidi Diarra went on to become the special Africa advisor for United Nations chairman Ban Ki Moon Cheick Hamallah Diarra later was an urban planner for the New York City municipal government Sidi Sosso Diarra the eldest of the brothers was a skilled accountant who later went on to be an influential civil servant for the Malian government Modibo Diarra relocated to the larger city of Segu when he was relatively ...
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Leila Kamali
Historian, editor, and political activist born on 10 December 1921 near Johannesburg, the child of Latvian Jews. Hirson was educated at Hebrew school in Johannesburg, and studied mathematics at the University of Witwatersrand, where he later worked as a physicist. In 1940 he joined the left‐wing Hashomer Hatzair, subsequently becoming a member of various Trotskyist groups. Between 1944 and 1946 he was a political organizer for the Workers' International League.
Hirson participated in setting up black trade unions, in extremely difficult conditions created by the Suppression of Communism Act. He became involved in the Non‐European Unity Movement, and in the late 1950s joined the Congress of Democrats, the white arm of the ANC‐led Congress Alliance.
After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 Hirson and his colleagues highly critical of the Congress Alliance s leadership and policies organized the National Committee for Liberation which advocated sabotage as a substitute for peaceful ...
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Robert Fay
Shirley Jackson grew up in Washington, D.C., where her parents, Beatrice and George Jackson, encouraged her interest in science by helping her to prepare school science projects. After graduating first in her class at Roosevelt High School, Jackson was one of only thirty women to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1964. She earned a B.S. degree in 1968 and a Ph.D. in 1973 from MIT, making her the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics and the first black woman to earn a doctorate in any subject from MIT.
After graduating from MIT, Jackson joined the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, as a research associate (1973–1974, 1975–1976), and was a visiting scientist at the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland (1974–1975). From 1976 to 1991 Jackson researched theoretical physics ...
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Sowande' Mustakeem
At the young age of twenty-six, Shirley Ann Jackson became not only the first African American woman to receive a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but also one of the first two women to receive a degree in theoretical physics from any university in the United States. In 1995, Jackson became both the first African American and first woman appointed to head the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees nuclear power plants in the United States. Additionally, in 1999, Jackson became the first African American president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York, the oldest university in the United States dedicated to research in science and engineering.
The second daughter of George and Beatrice Jackson, Jackson was born in Washington, DC She benefited greatly from the strong foundation her parents provided Her mother Beatrice a social worker regularly read to her often choosing the ...
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Daniel Donaghy
American physicist and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Shirley Ann Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., to Beatrice and George Jackson, who instilled in her, as well as in her sister, Alicia, a strong interest in school, especially the study of science. Her parents encouraged Jackson to think for herself from an early age. As a result, she excelled academically throughout elementary and middle school and at Roosevelt High School, where she participated in accelerated math and science programs and from which she graduated in 1964 as valedictorian. She moved on that fall to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was one of the few African American students and the only one pursuing a career in theoretical physics. She graduated in 1968 after completing her senior thesis on solid state physics and was accepted into many of the nation s most prestigious graduate programs ...
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Robert Fay
Richard Erskine Frere Leakey's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, introduced him to paleoanthropology, the study of fossilized remains of extinct humanlike creatures called hominids. The elder Leakeys, whose discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania revolutionized theories of early Human Evolution, often took Richard with them on their fossil-hunting expeditions. Leakey left Nairobi's Duke of York School at the age of seventeen to start a business leading wildlife photography safaris.
Although he had no formal training, Leakey began fossil-hunting when he was only nineteen. His most famous discoveries were made in the area around Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) in northern Kenya where he uncovered more than 200 fossils of early hominids These include an almost complete skeleton of an adolescent boy found at Nariokotome on the western shore The 1 6 million year old Turkana Boy is the most complete skeleton ever found from that period of ...
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Jeremy Rich
president of Niger, was born to a Hausa family in Zinder (a city dominated by the Hausa ethnic community) on 20 January 1950. After completing primary school, he attended secondary school in Niamey, the capital of Niger. He passed his baccalaureate examinations in 1969, and then went to France to continue his studies. Ousmane received a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Nantes in 1974, and continued his studies by turning to economics. Ousmane graduated in 1978 with two advanced degrees, in statistics and economics. Later, he moved to Canada, where he received two different business management degrees from schools in Quebec City and Montreal.
In the 1980s Ousmane was not involved in politics Instead he worked as an economic analyst for the government and helped develop and maintain development projects as well as coordinate census activities Ousmane briefly lived in Gabon where he worked ...
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Elizabeth Heath
A statistician and economist by training, Mahamane Ousmane was not involved in Niger’s politics until he founded the Convention Démocratique et Sociale-Rhama (CDS) in Zinder. With the support of the town’s wealthy Hausa merchants, he was able to organize a coalition of opposition parties, the Alliance des Forces du Changement (AFC), and defeat the ruling the Mouvement National de la Société de Développement (MNSD) in 1993 presidential elections.
As president, Ousmane eventually alienated many of his allies because of his lack of political finesse and charisma. He also faced a number of problems familiar to his predecessors: state bankruptcy, unrest among the Tuareg labor protests and severe droughts In order to obtain vital funding from international donors Ousmane was forced to enact structural adjustment austerity measures which only increased popular discontent Although his government both helped stabilize the economy and signed a peace treaty with Tuareg rebels opposition ...
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Meghan Elisabeth Healy
South African activist and botanist, was born Edward Rudolph Roux in 1903 in the Transvaal town of Pietersburg (now known as Polokwane). His father, Phillip Roux, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Edith Wilson Roux, was a nurse who had come to South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War. His father was an outspoken iconoclast: Despite his conservative Afrikaner upbringing, he was an atheist, socialist, and Anglophile who fought with the British in the Anglo-Boer War and dismissed Afrikaans as a peasant dialect. Eddie Roux was named after King Edward VII and his grandfather Eduard Roux.
In 1904, Roux moved with his parents to Johannesburg, where his father opened a pharmacy in the Bezuidenhout Valley and the family grew to include three more sons and two daughters. His father was active in the South African Labor Party and International Socialist League politics, and the 1913 miners strikes culminated in ...
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Juliette Bridgette Milner-Thornton
Zambian politician and civil engineer, was born in Ukmerge, Lithuania on 31 July 1925. In London, on 31 January 1954, Zukas married the artist, antiapartheid activist, and philanthropist Cynthia Robinson, daughter of Julius Robinson, a prominent Southern African businessman. The couple have two sons David (born 1955) and Alan (born 1959), (Zukas 2002, 81-108). Mrs. Zukas is chairwoman of the Lechwe Trust, an organization she founded to retain artworks of cultural significance in Zambia. She is also a board member of Zambia's National Arts Trust and National Museum, (Gabriel Ellison 2004, 35, 36).
Zukas's father, Chaim Zukas, a shopkeeper, changed his Jewish family surname “Segel” to “Zukas,” a Lithuanian surname, for political reasons. In 1936 Europe was in economic and political turmoil thus prompting Chaim to immigrate to South Africa to join his brother Joshua Segal sic and his Jewish wife s ...
