In support of Black Lives Matter, this week’s #TidyTuesday data highlights African American pioneers in many areas including entertainment, science, politics, military, sports, religion, law, and more between 1738 and 2019 1. For each achievement, the data contains a summary of the achievement, the individual’s name, the year of the achievement, the gender of the individual, and the broad category the achievement falls under. For a full list of the achievements, see this wikipedia article 2.
Overview of African American Achievements Over Time
To give a broad overview, I have created a time series plot below summarizing the number of recorded African American achievements each year between 1738 and 2019. Although this is an extreme simplification of the hard work and accomplishment of each of these individuals, it makes clear that the overall numbers started to increase dramatically around the mid 1900s corresponding to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Given that opportunities in almost all facets of society in the U.S. are still much more available for whites than for people of color, I can only imagine how much higher these already impressive numbers could be if there was an even playing field.
African American Achievements by Category
In order to analyze the distribution of these achievements across different facets of society, I created a barplot below representing the number of achievements in each designated category across the entire time period represented in the data.
Clearly, African Americans have especially contributed significantly to the areas of Arts & Entertainment, Education & Sciences, Politics, and Military.
Breakdown of Achievements Over Time By Gender and Category
In order to analyze the trends in achievements over time in more detail, I have created two dotplots below: one separating the achievements by gender, and one separating by category.
By Gender
Clearly and not surprisingly, significantly more of the achievements have been contributed my men than by women. This trend appears to be consistent across the entire time period, all the way to 2019.
By Category
The distributions by category are all fairly similar with the achievements in each category increasing significantly around 1950.
A notable and somewhat concerning pattern, however, is that in most categories (and in the overall graphs above), the number of achievements seems to have dropped off in recent years, with achievements peaking around the late 1900s-early 2000s. This could indicate that since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, we have gradually let civil rights slip to the back burner and have not made sufficient efforts to continue to make progress in expanding the voices of and opportunities for people of color. Hopefully the movement ignited by the tragic death of George Floyd will bring civil rights back to the forefront and keep it there. White supremacy is so deeply embedded in the roots of our society that we must work continuously to deconstruct not only interpersonal racism, but also the institutional and structural racism on which so many of our systems are based.
David Blackwell
Each of the individuals represented in this dataset deserve far more recognition than a point on a graph. I unfortunately can’t highlight each one of the 479 individuals, but I am choosing to highlight one outstanding individual who made enormous contributions to the field of statistics, David Blackwell.
David Blackwell (1919-2010) made significant contributions to game theory, information theory, probability theory, and Bayesian statistics. He also contributed to the well-known Rao-Blackwell theorum, was the first African American professor to be tenured at U.C. Berkley, was the first African American to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and was one of the first African Americans to earn a Ph.D., having done so at the impressive age of 22 years old! You can read more about him on this wikipedia page 4.
Smith College Professor Miles Ott has started a petition to rename a prestigious statistics award, currently named the Fisher Lecture after Ronald Fisher who was openly racist and a proponent of eugenics and Social Darwinism, to be named after David Blackwell instead. Please sign the petition here.
The code used to generate this post is found here.