Art, Science, Technology and the Advancement of Society

David Blackwell

Born: April 24, 1919; place: Centralia, Illinois
AB (1938) University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign; AM (1939) University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
Ph.D. (1941) Statistics, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaignthesis: Some Properties of Markoff Chains; Advisor: Joseph L. Doob
: Professor Emeritas of Statistics, University of California at Berkeley
Research Intertests: Mathematics
university URL: http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/users/davidbl/; email: none

David Blackwell is, to mathematicians, the most famous, perhaps greatest, African Amercan Mathematician. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics in 1938, Master of Arts in Mathematics in 1939, and his Ph.D. in 1941 (at the age of 22), all from the University of Illinois.
He is the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics. He is the first and only African American to be any one of: a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a President of the American Statistical Society, and a Vice President of the America Mathematics Society.

Chronology:

David Harold Blackwell grew up in Centralia, Illinois, a town of 12,000 on the "Mason-Dixson Line." He was raised in a family which expected and supported working hard and a little faster than most folk. Blackwell says he was fortunate to attend a mixed school rather than the all black school. While he was growing up, "Southern Illinois was probably fairly racist. But I was not even aware of these problems -- I had no sense of being discriminated against." As a schoolboy, Blackwell did not care for algebra and trigonometry ("I could do it and I could see that it was useful, but it wasn't really exciting.")

Geometry turned him on. "The most interesting thing I remember from calculus was Newton's method for solving equations. That was the only thing in calculus I really liked. The rest of it looked like stuff that was useful for engineers in finding moments of inertia and volumes and such."

In his junior year he took an elementary analysis course and really fell in love with mathematics. "That's the first time I knew that serious mathematics was for me. It became clear that it was not simply a few things that I liked. The whole subject was just beautiful." Four years later he had a Ph.D.

Dr. Blackwell was appointed a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1941 for a year. At that time, members of the Institute were automatically officially made visting fellows of Princeton University, and thus Blackwell was listed in its bulletin as such. This caused considerable ruckus as there had never been a black student, much less faculty fellow, at the University [most notably it had rejected Paul Robeson soley on race]. The president of Princeton wrote the director of the Institute that the Institute was abusing the University's hospitality by admitting a black.

At the Institute he met the great von Neumann who asked Blackwell about his thesis. Blackwell, "He [von Neumann] listened for ten minutes and he started telling me about my thesis." Colleagues in Princeton wished to extend Blackwell's appointment at the institute. However, the president of Princeton organized a great protestation.*

When it was time to leave the institute, Blackwell knew no white schools would hire him, and he applied to all 105 Black schools in the country. After instructorships at Southern University and Clark College, Dr. Blackwell joined the faculty of Howard University from 1944 as an instructor.. At the time, Howard University "was the ambition of every black scholar." In three years, Blackwell had risen to the rank of Full Professor and Chairman.

Inspite of heavy teaching duties, not to speak of heavy administrative duties and a mathematically unstimulating institution, Blackwell published a substantial amount of research. He spent a couple of summers at the RAND corporation and was a Visiting Professor of Statisitcs at Stanford University in 1950-51.

Still Blackwell searched for mathematics around Washington and met M. A. Girschick of the Department of Agriculture and who was to be a collaborator in many works: their 1954 book, Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions, is classic in the area. With the exception of a one year visit to Stanford University, Blackwell stayed at Howard until 1954. When he left, he had been Chair of the Department of Mathematics and had published more than 20 papers.

In 1954 he gave an invited address in probability at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Right afterwards, he was appointed Professor of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was chairman of the Statistics Department for many years.

He was President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1955. He has also been Vice President of the American Statistical Association, the International Statistical Institute, and the American Mathematical Society. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. In 1965 he became the first African American named to the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1979 Blackwell won the von Neumann Theory Prize (the Operations Research Society of America) in 1979. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Aside from the books he has published, his teaching ability is supported as the advisor to more than 50 Ph.D. students including the African American Wesley Thompson and the African Jonathan Chukwuemeka Nkwuo. A list of his students is here.

He also made a film Blackwell made for the American Mathematical Society called Guessing at Random.Though retired, Dr. Blackwell lives in Berkeley, California, where he remains active in mathematical research.

Queen Mother Elizabeth

Cattlett Mora, artist, sculptor

revolutionary activist

A piece by Mother Cattlett

dedicated to the Black Panther Party

Art, Science, Technology and the Advancement of Society

No society can advance without great minds working on that advancement in the scientific arena. North American Africans suffer a brain drain of their best minds co-opted and literally stolen from our community by the dominant culture. Rather than our genius students in math, engineering, technology, medicine and other areas working on our upliftment, they are lost and turned out by corporate capitalist America to be captives of the White Supremacy culture that siphons their genius talents for, among other things, the US military's world hegemony.

Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, perhaps the

greatest scientific mind produced

by North American Africans

On one level, we know segregation was a blessing simply because our best minds were restricted to our community. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, mathematicians, physicists all were forced to give their talents to us, rather than "them." Of course when "they" discovered the very best of us with genius talent, even under segregation they swooped us away, sometimes kidnapped us to serve white supremacy culture.

We think of the great mathematician Blackwell who remains largely unknown to our people even to this day because he was forced to serve "them." Science thus becomes a political phenomena, often for the benefit of an oppressive society. American scientists were made to work on the atomic bomb and later deeply regretted doing so. And you know one of us worked on that bomb as well.

It is the same in the arts. We need only think of Elizabeth Cattlett Mora, one of our very greatest painters and sculptors, who is only now at 90 years old, being discovered by her people, largely due to her revolutionary political views that were offensive and considered dangerous to the American government. A more recent example would be Gil Scott Herron, a tortured genius whose words were anathema to America.

Need we recall W.E.B. DuBois, perhaps our greatest mind ever produced in the hells of North America, a social scientist who eventually fled America to Africa, simply because with all his knowledge he felt like a nigguh, as he told Chairman Mao in China when Mao introduced him to speak before a million people at Tiananmen Square. Or think of the great mind and voice of Paul Robeson, another genius of the first order who was also hounded and treated like a dog because he refused to bow down to American racism and imperialism.

Paul Robeson, geat singer, actor,

revolutionary, activist, in his role as the
Moor in Shakespeare's Othello.

We wonder why so many of our problems go unsolved, yet it is simply because many of our best scientific and creative minds are captive of the dominant culture and prevented from addressing our critical issues, especially from a scientific perspective. When we consider revolution from a scientific perspective, we shall advance expeditiously. We must move beyond "any means necessary."

But how can we address this problem of the brain drain? Dr. Ben talked about the African brain drain in the destruction of Nile Valley Civilization. Of course the original mission of "Black Studies" was to obtain knowledge and return to the community, just as foreign students come to America, gain scientific skills, then return home to China, India, Africa, then proceed to nation build.

Black Studies morphed into creating a classical colonial elite group of scholars and scientists whose main focus became tenure rather than community. As a result, social problems, issues in health and welfare were neglected to the abject detriment of community. Their warped thinking allowed Europeans, Asians and others to address many critical issues, including history, sociology and philosophy. After 40 years, many of the historians on North American Africans are European. A Middle Eastern professor had to make the connection between the Black Arts Movement and Muslim American literature. A recent anthology of Black California literature is by a South Asian. Is this by design or simply slothful, niggardly thinking on the part of our scholars and social scientists? The most critical comment made against Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X is about his myopia in connecting Malcolm with community. No, it was his own connection or disconnection from community that prevented him from a proper analysis of Malcolm! Because of his training and alienation, it is often an awsome if not impossible task for the academic to make that connection to community.

The academic often suffers a degree of schizophrenia. Howard University's great young scholar, Dr. Greg Carr, asked me how was I able to make that transition from academia to the street, although I am more street than academic.

For me it is a matter of focus and concern. For sure, I am more comfortable at Academy of da Corner than academia. But it is a choice I made long ago. I was shocked during a lecture at Morehouse when a student asked how does one talk to the street brothers? He had obviously lost his mind and a "street" brother had to break it down for him.

But imagine the pervasiveness of the problem in academia, as revealed in Manning's biography. For example, his lack of understanding the powerful role of the Nation of Islam on the community in general and Malcolm in particular. The Nation of Islam was, in fact, the community black studies program. The philsosphy, mythology and ritual of the NOI was a fundamental factor in the transformation of radical consciousness in the North American African community during the 60s.

We see the result of the "Crisis of the Negro Intellectual" in the prison population, the economic devastation of our community with no real solution from our thinkers and scientists, the pervasive sexual or gender identity crisis due to lack of manhood and womanhood training.

Joseph Campbell would say we see the result in the headlines of the daily newspapers, the pervasive crime, partner violence, drug abuse and pandemic health issues. And yet within the very population usurped, surely lie answers to the many conundrums facing our people. Within the population of the socalled wretched of the earth are those genius minds who have the dedication but lack the opportunity to train for the scientific advancement of our nation.

Scholars who are captives in the colonial elite slave system lack the commitment to service our community. They are thus unable to give the needed inspiration so many of our children must have to seek advancement in the sciences so they can bring about the society for today and tomorrow.

As I have traveled across country to speak at colleges and universities, I've met very few students who are science majors, most are in the humanities, social sciences and business. But we need only observe the subjects foreign students major in to get a clue what areas we must stress to our students as members of an underdeveloped nation.

It is because we are philosophically off base that we cannot see our condition as communal rather than individual, something the foreign students are crystal clear about. They know for sure they are not in America to gain skills for their individual self, but rather for their people.

Somehow, perhaps a post-black studies philosophy can alter the mental blindness our children suffer. Black Studies has been an intentional failure because the dominant society had no interest in seriously uplifting our community.

At this present moment, America is clearly demonstrating she has no interest in us other than containment. She has use for our very best minds, the rest are disposable. Their labor is not needed, therefore there is no reason to properly educate them for the future. They are more valuable incarcerated, which only furthers the brain drain, for surely within those jails and prison cells are minds that are wasting away, but have the potential to save us from a myriad ills and afflictions, social, psychological, economic, political, scientific and spiritual.

Our poor children are convinced by wretched, evil, jealous and envious school teachers (white and black teachers) that they cannot learn foreign languages, physics, math and other sciences. Yet they are descendants of men and women who invented language, math, geometry, chemistry, biology and literature. Our culture is as scientific as it is musical, after all, music is science and math. We have thus been hoodwinked and bamboozled, lost and turned out on the way to grandmother's house (Whispers, Olivia).

Concerned community members must demand excellence only from our students. Anything less than excellence is an insult to our ancestors and elders. All this posing cool on the corner must go, except posing cool at Academy of da Corner, engaging in conversation that will propel us forward into the new millennium.

Students at Academy of da Corner,

14th and Broadway, Oakland CA

Imagine, some students used to "rap" on the steps of Oakland's Merritt College when it was on Grove Street or Martin Luther King, Jr. These students were self motivated to learn all they could about themselves and their people. These students went on to organize themselves for the liberation of their people. They shook up Oakland, America and the World. These students included Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Ernie Allen, Kenny Freeman, Carol Freeman, Richard Thorne, Ann Williams, Maurice Dawson, Isaac Moore, myself and others. Out of these students standing on the steps of Merritt College rapping developed the Black Panther Party and the Black Arts Movement.

The time calls for scientific revolution that will advance us into first class members of the world, equals with China, Brazil, India. As we did at Merritt College, students of today must discipline themselves to advance, not survive but thrive. Amiri Baraka asked students at San Francisco State University, "Is it difficult for you?" You must answer him, "No, sir!"

Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones),

our greatest living revolutinary

writer/activist.

--Marvin X

6/11/11

Marvin X is chancellor of Academy of

da Corner, a peripatetic school in Oakland CA

at 14th and Broadway, downtown. He is the

author of 30 books.