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Black History Month is almost over, and, as my husband quotes George Carlin to me, I’m interested in writing about Black Americans who have made great achievements but aren’t quite as famous as they should.
John Edgar Wideman was born in the same neighborhood as my grandfather in Pittsburgh, PA. Wideman is the author of more than one dozen novels. He was the second African-American Rhodes Scholar, in 1966. He has won many literary awards, and is the first person to have won the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice, for Sent for You Yesterday (1984) and Philadelphia Fire (1990). He currently teaches at Brown University.
Vivien Thomas was an African-American surgeon and surgical technician. Born in Louisiana in 1910, Thomas went to a segregated school that provided him with a decent education. He wanted to be a doctor, but his plans were derailed by the Great Depression. He became a laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Together, Blalock and Thomas proved the cause of hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. During this time, Thomas was listed as a “janitor”, though he was doing the job of a post-doctoral researcher. The pair went to Johns Hopkins in the 1940s, and, in 1943, began working on a solution to “blue baby syndrome” or cyanosis. Thomas never attended college or medical school, but nonetheless taught other surgeons his techniques. In 1976, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Johns Hopkins University.
Vernon Baker is a distinguished World War II veteran. Lieutenant Baker led his platoon to advance on a German stronghold. Lt. Baker killed several enemy soldiers and led a battalion advance toward the stronghold, Castle Aghinolfi. At the time, Lt. Baker received a Distinguished Service Cross. In 1993, the Clinton administration investigated racial discrimination in World War II. No Black WWII veterans had received the Medal of Honor. The investigators recommended that seven African-American veterans should receive the Medal of Honor. Lt. Vernon Baker was the only recipient still living. In 2008, Baker was awarded the Sandor Teszler Award for Moral Courage and Service to Humankind.
Going back to the operating room, Dr. Ben Carson is an accomplished neurosurgeon who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. Although he was initially a poor student, his mother, who had a third grade education and could not read, implemented strict rules that pulled Carson to the top of his class. He attended Yale University, then the Medical School of Michigan. He became a neurosurgery resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and, at 33, became the hospital’s professor and director of Pediatric Neurosurgery. In 1997, Dr. Carson successfully separated conjoined twins who were joined at the head. His autobiography, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, was made into a movie starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.
You may think that the name Mae C. Jemison rings a bell – at least, it did for me, though I wasn’t sure why. Jemison was the first African American woman admitted into NASA’s astronaut training program, in 1987. On September 12, 1992, Jemison and six other astronauts took off aboard the Endeavour and spent eight days in space. Prior to becoming an astronaut, Jemison was a medical doctor with degrees from Stanford University and Cornell University Medical College. Jemison has won several awards and honors, and also appeared on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (I’m a closet Trekkie.) She is currently a Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
I’m really looking forward to doing this next year, as I have learned about so many amazing people.
