4.20 Science, Medicine, and Technology in Black Communities

George Washington Carver, born enslaved, became a botanist and professor at Tuskegee Institute (3.10). He developed methods like crop rotation to keep soil from wearing out and advised President Theodore Roosevelt on agriculture.

Black women played key roles in the US space program. Katherine Johnson, a NASA mathematician, calculated flight paths that helped send astronauts into orbit and to the Moon and back. Mary Jackson became NASA's first Black female engineer; the required 1977 photo shows her at work. Mae Jemison, a physician and engineer, became the first African American woman to travel in space in 1992; the required photo shows her working in zero gravity.

Shut out of white institutions, African Americans built their own. They founded medical schools at Meharry, Howard, Morehouse and other HBCUs, and created the National Medical Association because the American Medical Association initially barred them. Black physicians worked with local governments to open some of the country's first nonsegregated hospitals in the late 1800s and during the Black hospital movement of the mid-1900s, and they provided free community care that encouraged early diagnosis.

Key contributions include:

• Onesimus: an enslaved African man in Boston who in 1721 explained variolation, a method of protecting people from smallpox by exposing them to a small amount of the disease, which he had learned in Africa. It helped curb smallpox in the colonies.
• Daniel Hale Williams: founded Provident Hospital in Chicago in 1891, the first Black-owned hospital in the US, and in 1893 performed one of the first successful heart surgeries.
• Kizzmekia Corbett: a scientist at the National Institutes of Health who was central to developing the Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

Black Americans' relationship with medicine also includes exploitation. In the 1840s, the doctor J. Marion Sims experimented on enslaved women, including Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, without anesthesia, and was later called the 'father of modern gynecology'; these women are now honored as its foremothers. In the Tuskegee syphilis study (1932–1972), the US Public Health Service watched hundreds of Black men with syphilis go untreated. In 1951, cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks without her consent; her 'HeLa' cells became the first human cells to keep growing in a lab and have been used in countless medical advances. Kadir Nelson's 2017 portrait of Lacks is a required source.

In the early 1900s, the rise of eugenics, a false science claiming some groups were biologically inferior, increased discrimination against people judged 'unfit' because of race or disability. Black people with disabilities faced multiple, compounding forms of oppression: harassment, institutionalization, violations of their rights and forced sterilization.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 built on the civil rights laws that ended Jim Crow (4.6). It bans discrimination against people with disabilities in areas such as employment, government programs and services, and public places.