Dr. Paul Ruffin, the first African American to hold the rank of senior research scientist in the United States Army, will address the 21st annual Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial Breakfast in Mobile later this month.
The breakfast, hosted by the Port City Chapter of Blacks In Government Inc., is set for Monday, Jan. 18 at 8:30 a.m. in the auditorium of Bishop State Community College’s Central Campus. Doors open at 8 a.m.
The speaker
Ruffin has spent 27 years as a research physicist at the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, where his work has centered on fiber optics, micro electro-mechanical systems and nanotechnology — the miniaturized sensing and guidance technologies that underpin modern missile systems.
In July 2003 he was promoted to senior research scientist, the Army’s highest technical grade, becoming the first African American to attain the title. He is a graduate of Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, one of the state’s historically Black institutions.
The choice of speaker had a certain logic for a King Day observance in Alabama. Ruffin’s career traced a path that ran entirely inside the state — from an HBCU in north Alabama into the federal scientific establishment at Redstone — and it did so during the decades in which that path was being opened.
The setting
Bishop State Community College, on Broad Street in Mobile, is itself part of that history. Founded in 1927 as a branch of Alabama State College to train Black teachers, it became a state junior college and, after desegregation, one of the primary paths into higher education for students across Mobile County. The college had recently endured a difficult period, having been at the center of the criminal investigation into financial operations in Alabama’s two-year college system that led to dozens of charges. Hosting a King Day breakfast was a reminder of the institution’s older and more durable purpose.
Blacks In Government
Blacks In Government is a national organization of Black federal, state and local government employees, founded in 1975 to advocate for equity in public-sector employment and to encourage young people into government service. The Port City Chapter serves the Mobile area, where the federal presence — the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the federal courthouse, and the civilian workforce attached to them — makes for a substantial constituency.
Proceeds from the breakfast benefit the chapter’s community service programs, including its adopted schools, oratorical contests and scholarship competitions. The oratorical contests in particular have long been a fixture of King Day observances in Alabama, sending students to podiums to recite and interpret King’s speeches, and occasionally producing a young speaker who reminds an audience why the words mattered.
Details
Tickets were $25 each. For more information, the chapter directed inquiries to Queen Daniels at (251) 591-8973 or PortCityBIG@yahoo.com.
The season around it
King Day 2010 in Mobile fell in the middle of a political year that would prove consequential. That same week, gubernatorial candidates were campaigning in the city, and U.S. Rep. Artur Davis — then attempting to become Alabama’s first Black governor — had just delivered the keynote at the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance’s annual Emancipation Proclamation service, also at Bishop State.
The King breakfast was not a political event, and its organizers were careful to keep it from becoming one. But the audience in that auditorium on Jan. 18 would include a good many people who had spent the preceding week thinking about exactly the question a Davis candidacy raised.