Commentary: African American Scientists, Explorers and Inventors By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Barbara Hillary (June 12, 1931 – November 23, 2019) was an American nurse, publisher, adventurer, and inspirational speaker. Hillary life is a testament to being courageous and resilient at all phases of a person’s life; no matter their age. Hillary was the first African American woman to reach both the North and South Poles. When Barbara Hillary passed away I remembered seeing remembrances of her life on cable TV and on NPR. Years earlier when she has accomplished many of the later feats for which she is best know for I had seen her in interviews.
Born in New York City and raised in Harlem, Hillary attended the New School University, from which she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in gerontology. She used her gerontology degrees to establish a career in nursing. Her focus was on training staff members in the concepts of patient aging and service delivery systems in nursing homes. Hillary was also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Peninsula Magazine, a non-profit multi-racial magazine based in Queens, New York. Peninsula magazine was ground breaking and the first of its kind in the New York city area. Hillary also founded the Arverne Action Association, a group dedicated to improving life in Arverne, New York and the Rockaway New York Community.
Still working at the age of 67, Hillary survived a bout with lung cancer. The resulting surgery caused her to lose 25 percent of her lungs’ capacity. Unfortunately this was actually her second fight with cancer. She had previously survived breast cancer in her mid-twenties .
After this second bout with cancer she subsequently retired from nursing. But unlike most retirees and older cancer survivors she actually became more active in the second chapter of her life. Hillary became interested in Arctic travel and fell in love with the beauty of the North, after photographing polar bears in Manitoba, Canada. At some point Hillary discovered that no black woman had reached the North Pole, so she decided to become the first one.
Top of the World- New Yorker Magazine – May 28, 2007 Issue
Barbara Hillary, a seventy-five-year-old resident of Queens, was on her way to becoming the first African-American woman on record to reach the North Pole. She had been taking her vitamins, hoarding fleece, and enduring grueling treadmill runs at Rockaway Park’s Cyberzone gym. The one part of the journey that was not proceeding smoothly, as she explained then, was the matter of how to pay for it: she had raised thirteen thousand dollars, but she needed almost twice that amount to make the trip. Hillary seemed convinced that she would overcome this financial hurdle—“I believe mental poverty is a self-inflicted condition,” she said, as if to reify the expedition into existence. And many of this magazine’s readers—including an eleven-year-old boy from Louisiana, who wrote, “You have had a great life,” and a man who sent a two-dollar bill, for luck—shared Hillary’s determination. Fortified by their good wishes and their contributions, Hillary arrived in Longyearbyen, Norway, on April 16th.
Hillary had raised over $25,000 to fund her expedition to the Arctic. Upon her arrival, she also had to pass a fitness exam. After a battery of tests, she was deemed fit to participate in the expedition.
On April 23, 2007, at the age of 76, Hillary became not only one of the oldest persons to set foot on the North Pole, but also the first African American woman to do so. Barbara Hillary dedicated her travel to the North Pole to her mother, Viola Jones Hillary, who moved from the “Low country” of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina to New York City in the 1930s to give Barbara and her sister, a chance for a better life. Barbara Hillary’s father had died when she was only one year old.
“Part of you is saying, ‘I can’t believe I made it this far’; another part is saying, ‘Let this thing be over with’; another part, ‘Damn, it’s cold’; and another part, ‘The time is here. Can you rise to the occasion?’ All of that is compounded by the fact that the sun is shining at three-thirty in the morning. Talk about a head trip.” Swaddled in layers of long underwear, a red-and-black snowsuit, and a blue hooded shell, Hillary looked like a sumo wrestler on skis as she slogged across the desolate tundra. Pressure ridges—“incredibly beautiful ice sculpture made by nature”—yielded intermittent wonder, but, otherwise, the journey was as illimitable as the terrain. “It just seemed like I would never get there,” Hillary said. “I asked my guide, ‘When am I going to reach the North Pole?’ and he didn’t say anything—he just kept going and going.” After several hours, the guide stopped and turned to Hillary. “He said, ‘Barbara, you’re standing on top of the world,’ ” she recalled. “That’s when I went crazy!”
In a moment of elation (and temporary climate amnesia), Hillary ripped off her gloves and thrust her fists into the air. “I have never experienced such sheer joy and excitement,” she said. “I was screaming, jumping up and down, for the first few minutes,” she said. For her trouble, she got a frostbitten thumb and a terrific photograph.
Top of the World- New Yorker Magazine – May 28, 2007 Issue
Five years later, after her history making journey to the North Pole, on January 6, 2011, at age 79 Hillary wowed the world again by becoming the first African American woman to reach the South Pole.
After her expeditions to the North and South Poles, Hillary became an inspirational speaker. She was the subject of profiles on several major news outlets and gave speeches to various organizations, including the National Organization for Women. (NOW). In 2019, she traveled to outer Mongolia to investigate the impact of climate change.
After being admitted to a hospital in Far Rockaway, New York she passed away on November 23, 2019 in New York. She was 88 years old.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Karmelo Anthony was sentenced to 35 years by a non-Black jury. Here’s why that matters, and what we can do about it. The Grio: Karmelo Anthony’s case is a reminder of the importance of jury duty in Black communities
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This week, 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison for the fatal stabbing of Austin Metcalf, a white 17-year-old student-athlete, during a track meet in Frisco, Texas. The verdict, handed down in Collin County, has since ignited a firestorm of debate across social media, activist circles, legal commentary, and community spaces, and at the center of it all is one glaring detail: the jury.
In Collin County, where the trial took place, Black people make up 12.1% of the population, per the Dallas Morning News. And yet, of the approximately 600 residents summoned for jury duty, the trial ultimately concluded with 12 jurors and 6 alternates — not one of whom identified as Black. According to CBS News, the prosecution dismissed the three Black qualified jurors during the final jury selection. Despite Anthony’s defense attorneys accusing prosecutors of removing them without proper cause, the prosecution argued that the case’s circumstances were “race-neutral” and did not require a diverse jury. Judge John Roach Jr. ultimately sided with the prosecutors.
However, many community members saw things differently.
“The prosecution used its final strikes to remove the remaining qualified Black jurors from the jury pool, raising serious concerns about fairness and equal justice,” Next Generation Action Network, a civil rights organization, shared in light of the jury selection. “We respect the court, but we will not remain silent.”
Law professor Anna Offit echoed those concerns in an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News, pointing out that in Texas, the stakes of jury composition are particularly high because jurors don’t just decide guilt or innocence; they also decide the sentence.
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The remarks were made after a judge lifted a gag order that had prevented both families from speaking publicly. Hollywood Unlocked: Austin Metcalf’s Father Goes Nuclear On Karmelo Anthony’s ‘Grifting’ Parents, Calls Father A ‘P***y Coward’ And Mother A ‘Drunk B*tch,’ Says CPS Should Be Called On Them; Labels Karmelo ‘Watermelon Felon’
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As the gag order is lifted in the Karmelo Anthony and Austin Metcalf case, the 17-year-old stabbing victim’s father, Jeff Metcalf, goes nuclear on the parents of the teen who killed his son: Andrew Anthony and Kala Hayes Anthony.
As we previously shared, on Tuesday (June 9), a White judge read the verdict after an all-White jury deliberated for less than 2 hours, convicting Karmelo of first-degree murder. Hours later, the judge sentenced him to 35 years in prison, eligible for parole in 17.5 years.
On Wednesday evening (June 10), an interview surfaced online with Jeff Metcalf. As he spoke with Sarah Fields on the JinxedSip Podcast, Jeff held nothing back as he spoke for nearly 3 hours straight. After revealing officials lifted the gag order, Jeff called out Karmelo’s parents. He said:
“Drew Anthony, Kala, you’re cowards. You wouldn’t even show up for your son’s sentencing or victim statement impact. You abandoned your kid. You left him there. I guess he’s no more use to you ‘cause you can’t get anymore GoFundMe money or [Give]SendGo money. You are grifters. You should be ashamed of yourselves. You raised that child and I swear to God, CPS should come check on those other three that you still have. You never once admitted or took accountability. You tried to play victim. The real victim is the one who died. Not the one who shoved a knife in his chest.”
Jeff continued to claim that he stood in prayer with the family in hopes to “close the gap on this unbelievable racial divide,” but that they only “widened the gap even further.” He continued to call out everyone pulling the race card. He said, “The race card, Black fatigue, it’s real. I’m sorry. You’ve embarrassed your own culture and race.” He continued to claim he is “not racist.” However, he added that he is “racist against a**holes. I don’t like them. I could care less about the color of your skin. We all bleed the same color.”
Jeff continued to fire off on Karmelo’s parents:
“Drew, you’re a p***y and a coward, and you raised one. Kala, you drunk b*tch. What’d you do to that boy to make him stab somebody? My God, what kind of mother are you?”
Jeff went on to taunt folks pulling the race card and offered to make up a racist name for Karmelo, dubbing him “Watermelon Felon.” He asked, “How’s that one strike ya? I hope he enjoyed his first night in that cell last night, ‘cause he’s gonna have many nights to think about what the f**k he did.” Jeff continued to speak on forgiving Karmelo to continue living in peace. He says, ”I forgive him, so I don’t carry the hate.”
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People don’t talk enough about how deeply military service in the United States is intertwined with economic inequality. The Grio: For many Americans, especially from impoverished areas, the military is not a calling but a pathway out
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My mother grew up in Clarksdale, a small city in the Mississippi Delta that proudly calls itself the birthplace of the blues. Recently, it drew attention as the setting for the award-winning film “Sinners,” a story rooted in the 1930s, that broke Academy Award records with 16 nominations.
But what struck many people I know wasn’t the history of the city. It was something more basic. For years, Clarksdale didn’t even have a movie theater. The nearest one was over an hour away.
That fact surprised my friends and academic colleagues. It shouldn’t have. It only feels surprising if you’ve never seen rural poverty up close.
Across the United States, rural communities in the South face persistent disinvestment, with fewer hospitals, grocery stores, and cultural institutions than their urban counterparts. The military has taken my family far from the Delta, and with that distance comes a kind of cultural disconnect. I now live among people who have never had to think about what it means to grow up somewhere without basic amenities, or what it takes to leave.
At 17, my mother did something neither of her parents had the chance to do: she graduated from high school. She dreamed of going to college, but the cost made that dream feel out of reach. As the oldest of six children, she understood what home would mean—another mouth to feed, another strain on already limited resources.
So, at 17, she enlisted in the U.S. Army.
That decision changed everything. She was 17 years old, so she required her mother’s signature to enlist. She served for 20 years beginning in 1980, built a career as a food inspector, and eventually earned a master’s degree. Her service created opportunities not just for herself, but for me, her only child. There is no version of my life that exists without that decision. I spent most of my childhood on military bases and by luck, my mother’s design, or both I always landed in well-funded school systems. I’m a law professor and director of a veteran’s legal clinic because of all the sacrifices she made for me.
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