Benjamin Banneker's legacy, contributions to Black history live on in Baltimore County
BALTIMORE -- Baltimore County native Benjamin Banneker's contributions to Black history are stories of resilience, activism, and ingenuity.
Banneker was born on a farm in 1731 in Oella, Maryland. Near the heart of Catonsville, in Baltimore County, are the keys to an impressive legacy at the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum.
"Mr. Banneker, you see his name pop up on different types of buildings, schools, library buildings, etcetera, like this one," said Nicholas Anderson, with the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park & Museum. "It's actually because he's pretty significant in the foundation of the United States of America."
Who is Benjamin Banneker?
The "Banneka" family settled on the land in Oella which historians described as a wild area, yet untapped by the young nation's westward expansion.
"Like even as they called it Baltimore town in 1756ish, were really worried about invasion from the French and the Indigenous allies, so this area would have been largely unsettled and going under periods of cultivation where individuals are coming in and clearing the land planting tobacco," Anderson said.
Historians said Banneker was self-taught, a multi-racial person, whose paternal grandmother was a white British woman who came to America as an indentured servant.
Raised by his parents who were freed slaves, Banneker taught himself math and science, and he was obsessed with astronomy and studying the stars in the sky, thanks to a neighbor down the Patapsco River named George Ellicott, one of three Quaker brothers from Pennsylvania who settled nearby, creating Ellicott Mills, which is now Ellicott City.
"He was innately gifted, and I believe his interest, George Ellicott, introduced him to astronomy, and so he actually creates almanacs charting the stars," said Dr. Ida Jones, an archivist and historian at Morgan State University. "This is the 1700s where he's doing this with very little technology in terms of the telescope and the fancy gadgets that you eventually have by the mid-19th century."
"It's a transformative moment for him because he gets to see some modern technology," Anderson added. "He has access to the mill store but he also gains a friend in George Ellicott. With him being several years younger than Mr. Banneker is actually a standard of how much Mr. Banneker knows, as a self-taught mathematician and that kind of opens up his world."
Banneker died in 1806 at the age of 74.
Brains behind the boundaries of Washington, D.C.
From accurately charting eclipses over the Indian Ocean and London to creating the first known wooden clock in America from scratch, Banneker was a man of many talents, which also included farming and surveying.
In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired George Ellicott's brother – Andrew Ellicott – to survey 100 square miles of land that would become a federal square that we know now as Washington, D.C. Banneker was hired as an assistant surveyor, capitalizing on his brilliance in astronomy to calculate and establish the southwestern parts of our nation's capital.
Today, the southwest boundary stone sits in the middle of a Falls Church, Virginia, neighborhood at Benjamin Banneker Park, as a national historic landmark.
"So you have Silver Spring, Maryland, Falls Church, Alexandria and Seat Pleasant down here," Anderson said. "This territory is kind of swampy, it's an area where there is tidal run-off so you can see what he's working in, and they were hoping that Mr. Benjamin Banneker contributed to turning this big chunk of wilderness into an area where legislation is eventually going to be passed, where people can come and have discourse."
"And he had a photographic memory to remember L'Enfant's plans as well, so had he not remembered those plans, who knows what Washington D.C. would have looked like in terms of its configuration."
Civil rights activism
Banneker was also known for his almanacs which would be dispersed around the nation and eventually overseas with help from the likes of Thomas Jefferson.
Not to be lost in Banneker's brilliance was his activism for civil rights and those still in chains by way of slavery. Banneker wrote a 14-page letter to Jefferson on the attributes of his giftedness.
"And that this one drop of white blood did not make any smarter or less smarter than those enslaved Africans," Jones said.
"This is an individual who has proved that these people are intelligent, not less than," Anderson added.
Banneker and the African American diaspora was always so much more than the boxes America placed them in. Generations later, on that same farm in Oella, his legacy lives on to inspire and contribute to the rich tapestry that is Black history and American history.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Miami Herald
36 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
New synthetic ‘skin' gives robots human touch
By Stephen Beech A new synthetic "skin" gives robots the human touch. The low-cost, durable and highly-sensitive material can be added to robotic hands just like a glove, say scientists. It enables automatons to detect information about their surroundings in a way that's similar to humans, according to research published in the journal Science Robotics. The research team, from the University of Cambridge and University College London (UCL), developed the flexible, conductive skin, which is easy to fabricate and can be melted down and formed into multiple shapes. They say the new technology senses and processes various physical inputs, allowing robots to interact with the physical world in a more meaningful way. Unlike other solutions for robotic touch, which usually work via sensors embedded in small areas and require different sensors to detect different types of touch, the entirety of the electronic skin developed by the British team is a sensor, bringing it closer to human skin. Previously, signals from different sensors could interfere with each other, and the materials were easily damaged. Although the new robotic skin is not as sensitive as human skin, the researchers say it can detect signals from more than 860,000 tiny pathways in the material. That enables it to recognise different types of touch and pressure, such as the tap of a finger, a hot or cold surface, damage caused by cutting or stabbing, or multiple points being touched at once, in a single material. The research team used a combination of physical tests and machine learning techniques to help the robotic skin "learn" which of these pathways matter most, so it can sense different types of contact more efficiently. As well as the potential for humanoid robots or human prosthetics where a sense of touch is vital, the researchers say the robotic skin could be useful in industry and even disaster relief. Study lead author Dr. David Hardman, from Cambridge's Department of Engineering, said: "Having different sensors for different types of touch leads to materials that are complex to make. "We wanted to develop a solution that can detect multiple types of touch at once, but in a single material." Co-author Dr. Thomas George Thuruthel, of UCL, said: "At the same time, we need something that's cheap and durable, so that it's suitable for widespread use." Their solution uses a type of sensor that reacts differently to different types of touch, known as multi-modal sensing. While it's challenging to separate out the cause of each signal, the researchers explained that multi-modal sensing materials are easier to make and more robust. The team melted down a soft, stretchy and electrically conductive gelatine-based hydrogel, and cast it into the shape of a human hand. They tested several different electrode configurations to determine which gave them the most useful information about different types of touch. From 32 electrodes placed at the wrist, they were able to collect more than 1.7 million pieces of information over the whole hand, thanks to the tiny pathways in the conductive material. The skin was then tested on different types of touch. The researchers blasted it with a heat gun, pressed it with their fingers and a robotic arm, gently touched it with their fingers, and even cut it open with a scalpel. They then used the data gathered during testing to train a machine learning model so the hand would recognise what the different types of touch meant. Dr. Hardman said: "We're able to squeeze a lot of information from these materials – they can take thousands of measurements very quickly. "They're measuring lots of different things at once, over a large surface area." Dr. Thuruthel added: "We're not quite at the level where the robotic skin is as good as human skin, but we think it's better than anything else out there at the moment. "Our method is flexible and easier to build than traditional sensors, and we're able to calibrate it using human touch for a range of tasks." The team is now hoping to improve the durability of the electronic skin and to carry out further tests involving real-world robotic tasks. The post New synthetic 'skin' gives robots human touch appeared first on Talker. Copyright Talker News. All Rights Reserved.
Chicago Tribune
an hour ago
- Chicago Tribune
New paper sheds light on experience of Black prisoners in infamous Stateville prison malaria experiments
Much has been said and written over the years about controversial malaria research conducted on inmates at Illinois' Stateville Penitentiary starting in the 1940s. But at least one part of that story has been largely ignored until now: the role of Black prisoners in that research, which helped lead to the modern practice of using genetic testing to understand how individual patients will react to certain medications, according to the authors of a newly published paper out of the University of Utah. 'We want to highlight the stories of Black prisoners that participated in this prison research in the 1950s onward and give them their due,' said Hannah Allen, a medical ethicist and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and first author of the paper, which was published as an opinion piece Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 'They haven't been properly acknowledged in the past, and their participation in these studies was really foundational in launching the field of pharmacogenetics and, later on, precision medicine,' said Allen, who recently completed her doctorate at the University of Utah. Starting in the 1940s, researchers infected inmates at the Joliet-area prison with malaria to test the effectiveness of drugs to treat the illness as part of a U.S. military-funded effort to protect American troops overseas, according to the paper. A University of Chicago doctor was the principal investigator. The inmates consented to being part of the studies and were paid for their participation. At first, the research was greeted with enthusiasm. In 1945, Life magazine ran a spread about it, featuring a photo of a Stateville inmate with cups containing malaria-carrying mosquitoes pressed against his bare chest. The first line of the story reads, 'In three U.S. penitentiaries men who have been imprisoned as enemies of society are now helping science fight another enemy of society.' But as the years passed, attitudes began to shift. Questions arose about whether inmates could truly, freely consent to participate in medical experiments or whether they felt coerced into them because of their often dire circumstances. At the Nuremberg trials, defense attorneys for Nazi doctors introduced text and images from the Life article about Stateville prison, though an Illinois physician argued at the trials that the prisoners in Stateville consented to being part of medical research whereas Nazi prisoners did not, according to the JAMA paper. In the mid-1970s, news broke about a study at Tuskegee, in which Black men with syphilis went untreated for years — news that raised awareness of ethical problems in medical research. News outlets also began publishing more stories about prison research, according to the JAMA article. The Chicago Tribune published an article in 1973, in which an inmate participating in the Stateville malaria research said: 'I've been coerced into the project — for the money. Being here has nothing to do with 'doing good for mankind' … I didn't want to keep taking money from my family.' The experiments at Stateville came to a halt in the 1970s. A number of protections and regulations are now in place when it comes to research involving prisoners. Since the 1970s, the Stateville research has often been discussed and analyzed but little attention has been paid to its Black participants, said James Tabery, a medical ethicist and philosophy professor at the University of Utah who led the new research, which was funded by the federal National Institutes of Health. For a time, Black prisoners were excluded from the studies because of a myth that Black people were immune to malaria, Tabery said. Later on, once scientists had pinpointed the drug primaquine as an effective medication for malaria, they turned their attention to the question of why 5% to 10% of Black men experienced a violent reaction to the drug, according to the paper. Ultimately, the scientists were successful, finding that the adverse reaction was related to a specific genetic deficiency. 'There are people all over Chicago today that are getting tested, that clinicians are recommending they get a genetic test before they get prescribed a drug because they want to make sure that their patient isn't going to have an adverse reaction to the drug,' Tabery said. 'It's really sort of powerful and interesting that you can trace that approach to doing good clinical medicine right back to this particular moment and place and population.' But Tabery and Allen also found that the Black prisoners were not treated the same as the white prisoners who participated in research at Stateville. For one, they weren't paid as much as the white prisoners, the rationale being that the white prisoners were infected with malaria, whereas the Black prisoners were given the drug but not infected with the disease — though some of the Black prisoners got very ill after taking the medication, according to the paper. Also, researchers didn't protect the Black participants' privacy as well as they did for other participants. They published certain identifying information about the Black participants, such as initials, ages, heights and weights, whereas participants in the previous research were represented with case numbers, according to the paper. Researchers also recruited the Black prisoners' family members for the study, which they didn't do with earlier participants, according to the paper. 'You see them just doing things with the Black prisoners that they're not doing with the white prisoners,' Tabery said. Also, though scientists made an important discovery through the research on Black prisoners, the episode also highlights the difficulty that can occur in translating discoveries into real life help for patients. Though the World Health Organization now recommends genetic testing to protect people who are sensitive to antimalarials, many of the people who would benefit most from such testing still don't receive it because of financial barriers, supply chain issues and a lack of training, according to the paper. 'What we found is when you sort of shift to what was happening to the Black prisoners, these other lessons you hadn't thought of as being derivable from Stateville suddenly do become apparent,' Tabery said.
Miami Herald
3 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Cave-dwelling tarantula — at home in total darkness — rediscovered after 133 years
A cave-dwelling tarantula not seen since it was first described in 1892 has been rediscovered in the Philippines. French naturalist Eugène Simon first discovered Orphnaecus pellitus in the Culapnitan Caves in the Philippines. It was in this same cave system where researchers confirmed its continued existence 133 years later, according to a June 5 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Subterranean Biology. Researchers said Simon only got a 'quick observation' of the tarantula, but based on his descriptions, experts suspected the species was troglobitic, or adapted to live exclusively in the complete darkness of caves. Orphnaecus pellitus specimens were collected from the dark zones of three interconnected caves, where there is no penetration of light, according to the study. Researchers said physical characteristics such as its 'distinctly tiny eyes,' elongated legs and light body color confirmed the species to be a 'true troglobitic tarantula,' and the only one out of '19 known troglobitic tarantula species' worldwide to exist in Asia. The tarantulas were subjected to a hypoxia test, which researchers often perform to assess a species' adaptations to low-oxygen environments like caves. They discovered that when deprived of oxygen, Orphnaecus pellitus took between five and 12 minutes to lose consciousness, whereas other species typically become unresponsive in less than two minutes, according to the study. Orphnaecus pellitus was quick to recover, and no fatalities were recorded, researchers said. The tarantulas also displayed 'heightened sensitivity to ground movements,' retreating into their burrows when they were approached from more than 3 feet away, according to the study. The species has developed highly efficient prey detection and capture instincts, researchers said, adding that specimens they collected and observed in a laboratory setting never once paused to observe their surroundings before capturing live insects. Juveniles were observed preying on insects three times their body size, researchers said. During their fieldwork, researchers discovered two new tarantula species in the forests surround the caves. Both species are members of the Orphnaecus genus, according to the study. The research team included Darrell C. Acuña, Lorenz Rhuel P. Ragasa, Myla R. Santiago-Bautista, Volker von Wirth and Leonardo A. Guevarra Jr.
