FYI April 18, 2018

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On This Day

1949 – The keel for the aircraft carrier USS United States is laid down at Newport News Drydock and Shipbuilding. However, construction is canceled five days later, resulting in the Revolt of the Admirals.

A Cold War incident known as the “Revolt of the Admirals” involved a number of retired and active-duty United States Navy admirals who publicly disagreed with President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson in their emphasis on strategic nuclear bombing executed by the United States Air Force as the primary means by which the nation and its interests were defended. The episode occurred in 1949 during a time wherein the administration was attempting to severely reduce military expenditures.

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Born On This Day

1813 – James McCune Smith, African-American physician, apothecary, abolitionist, and author (d. 1865)

James McCune Smith (April 18, 1813 – November 17, 1865) was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist, and author. He was the first African American to hold a medical degree and graduated at the top in his class at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. After his return to the United States, he became the first African American to run a pharmacy in that nation.

In addition to practicing as a doctor for nearly 20 years at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, Smith was a public intellectual: he contributed articles to medical journals, participated in learned societies, and wrote numerous essays and articles drawing from his medical and statistical training. He used his training in medicine and statistics to refute common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. Invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society in 1852, which promoted a new science, he was elected as a member in 1854 of the recently founded American Geographic Society. But he was never admitted to the American Medical Association or local medical associations.

He has been most well known for his leadership as an abolitionist: a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with Frederick Douglass he helped start the National Council of Colored People in 1853, the first permanent national organization for blacks. Douglass called Smith “the single most important influence on his life.”[1]

Smith was one of the Committee of Thirteen, who organized in 1850 in New York City to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law by aiding refugee slaves through the Underground Railroad. Other leading abolitionist activists were among his friends and colleagues. From the 1840s, Smith lectured on race and abolitionism and wrote numerous articles to refute racist ideas about black capacities.

Both Smith and his wife were of mixed-race African and European ancestry. As he became economically successful, Smith built a house in a mostly white neighborhood; in the 1860 census he and his family were classified as white, whereas in 1850 they were classified as mulatto.

He served for nearly 20 years as the doctor at the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York. After it was burned down in July 1863 by a mob in the New York Draft Riots, in which nearly 100 blacks were killed, Smith moved his family and practice to Brooklyn for their safety. The parents stressed education for their children. In the 1870 census, his widow and children continued to be classified as white.

To escape racial discrimination, his children passed into white society: the four surviving sons married white spouses; his unmarried daughter lived with a brother. They worked as teachers, a lawyer, and business people. Smith’s unique achievements as a pioneering African-American doctor were rediscovered by 20th-century historians. They were relearned by his descendants in the twenty-first century when a three-times-great-granddaughter took a history class and found his name in her grandmother’s family bible. In 2010, several Smith descendants commissioned a new tombstone for his grave in Brooklyn. They gathered to honor him and their African-American ancestry.

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FYI

Tammi Jo Schults
Courtesy of Linda Maloney MilitaryFlyMoms

By Jeff Schogol: Hero Pilot Who Saved Southwest Flight Was One Of The Navy’s First Female Fighter Jockeys
 
 
 
 

By Justin T. Westbrook: The Pilot Who Saved That Southwest Flight Is A Badass

Shults was one of the first women fighter pilots in U.S. Navy history, as well as being one of the first to pilot the F/A 18 jet, as reported by Heavy.com. Shults is from New Mexico, and joined the Navy in 1985, where she also flew the LTV A-7 Corsair as part of VAQ-34, an electronic aggressor squadron, according to All Hands, a Navy magazine.

https://youtu.be/fASCzgKS0Qg

 
 
 
 
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