Thomas de Saliere Tucker: Reconciling Industrial and Liberal Arts Education at Florida\u27s Normal School for Colored Teachers, 1887-1901

At one and the same time, Thomas de Saliere Tucker\u27s life and career in academia exemplified the triumph of liberty and human rights over slavery in the second half of the 19th century and the difficulty often encountered by those who challenged the long-held notion that equal education could be provided to blacks and whites in separate but equal educational institutions. In 1889 the Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction proclaimed that it has become a settled policy in the State that competent colored teachers shall be employed to teach the colored children and youth. 1 Seven years later, the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson. There, the Court held that the establishment of separate schools for white and black students was a valid exercise of legislative power, and it was, therefore, a fallacy of the plaintiffs argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. 2 The educational philosophy of the day harkened back to the mindset of colonization, an early 19th century scheme that proposed the establishment of black-run independent republics in the Caribbean or Africa in order to avoid a race war in the United States. By the end of the century educational leaders presupposed that blacks and whites could be educated in separate schools and that adult blacks could then be brought up, at the public expense, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniuses. 3 As the United States became more industrialized, agricultural and industrial education became the model that historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) followed

The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance

INTRODUCTION Investment in Africa over the past year with regard to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) sequencing has led to a massive increase in the number of sequences, which, to date, exceeds 100,000 sequences generated to track the pandemic on the continent. These sequences have profoundly affected how public health officials in Africa have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. RATIONALE We demonstrate how the first 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences from Africa have helped monitor the epidemic on the continent, how genomic surveillance expanded over the course of the pandemic, and how we adapted our sequencing methods to deal with an evolving virus. Finally, we also examine how viral lineages have spread across the continent in a phylogeographic framework to gain insights into the underlying temporal and spatial transmission dynamics for several variants of concern (VOCs). RESULTS Our results indicate that the number of countries in Africa that can sequence the virus within their own borders is growing and that this is coupled with a shorter turnaround time from the time of sampling to sequence submission. Ongoing evolution necessitated the continual updating of primer sets, and, as a result, eight primer sets were designed in tandem with viral evolution and used to ensure effective sequencing of the virus. The pandemic unfolded through multiple waves of infection that were each driven by distinct genetic lineages, with B.1-like ancestral strains associated with the first pandemic wave of infections in 2020. Successive waves on the continent were fueled by different VOCs, with Alpha and Beta cocirculating in distinct spatial patterns during the second wave and Delta and Omicron affecting the whole continent during the third and fourth waves, respectively. Phylogeographic reconstruction points toward distinct differences in viral importation and exportation patterns associated with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants and subvariants, when considering both Africa versus the rest of the world and viral dissemination within the continent. Our epidemiological and phylogenetic inferences therefore underscore the heterogeneous nature of the pandemic on the continent and highlight key insights and challenges, for instance, recognizing the limitations of low testing proportions. We also highlight the early warning capacity that genomic surveillance in Africa has had for the rest of the world with the detection of new lineages and variants, the most recent being the characterization of various Omicron subvariants. CONCLUSION Sustained investment for diagnostics and genomic surveillance in Africa is needed as the virus continues to evolve. This is important not only to help combat SARS-CoV-2 on the continent but also because it can be used as a platform to help address the many emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats in Africa. In particular, capacity building for local sequencing within countries or within the continent should be prioritized because this is generally associated with shorter turnaround times, providing the most benefit to local public health authorities tasked with pandemic response and mitigation and allowing for the fastest reaction to localized outbreaks. These investments are crucial for pandemic preparedness and response and will serve the health of the continent well into the 21st century