Henry Ruggs III - Raiders 1st Round Pick (12th overall)
excerpts from article: Henry Ruggs, Jerry Jeudy Drafted
by Sam Marsdale
"Ruggs' speed alone helps both the running and passing games because it forces safeties into more passive positioning," NFL.com draft analyst Lance Zierlein wrote of Ruggs. "He can work all three levels and his ability to turn slants and crossing routes into big gainers could make him the favorite gift under the tree for a quarterback and offense in need of an explosive weapon. He has quick, sure hands to handle off-target throws, but learning to release, separate and catch against physical NFL cornerbacks could require an adjustment period. He won't rack up the targets, but has explosive speed and talent to imprint on games with regularity." “One of these players will elevate an offense to different heights, and as good as Jeudy and Lamb are, they aren't the lightning-in-a-bottle player that you can't take your eyes off. Ruggs is,” former NFL quarterbackDavid Carrwrote. “The speedster is a combination ofDeSean JacksonandTyreek Hill. He has home run ability from anywhere on the field.” “Henry Ruggs is my No. 1 receiver in this year's draft class simply because he changes the game the most,” former NFL offensive lineman Brian Baldinger said. “He brings a different kind of speed that will give defenses major problems -- remember, he ran a 4.27-second 40-yard dash at the NFL Scouting Combineand was disappointed. He's like the Cheetah,Tyreek Hill, but bigger and stronger. That's a dangerous skill set.”
The news was terrifying to colonists in Massachusetts: Smallpox had made it to Boston and was spreading rapidly. The first victims, passengers on a ship from the Caribbean, were shut up in a house identified only by a red flag that read “God have mercy on this house.” Meanwhile, hundreds of residents of the bustling colonial town had started to flee for their lives, terrified of what might happen if they exposed themselves to the frequently deadly disease.
They had reason to fear. The virus was extremely contagious, spreading like wildfire in large epidemics. Smallpox patients experienced fever, fatigue and a crusty rash that could leave disfiguring scars. In up to 30 percent of cases, it killed.
A Boston advertisement for a cargo of about 250 slaves recently arrived from Africa circa 1700, particularly stressing that the slaves are free of smallpox, having been quarantined on their ship.
MPI/Getty Images
But the smallpox epidemic of 1721 was different than any that came before it. As sickness swept through the city, killing hundreds in a time before modern medical treatment or a robust understanding of infectious disease, an enslaved man known only as Onesimus suggested a potential way to keep people from getting sick. Intrigued by Onesimus’ idea, a brave doctor and an outspoken minister undertook a bold experiment to try to stop smallpox in its tracks.
Smallpox was one of the era’s deadliest afflictions. “Few diseases at this time were as universal or fatal,” notes historian Susan Pryor. The colonists saw its effects not just among their own countrymen, but among the Native Americans to whom they introduced the disease. Smallpox destroyed Native communities that, with no immunity, were unable to fight off the virus.
Smallpox also entered the colonies on slave ships, transmitted by enslaved people who, in packed and unsanitary quarters, passed the disease along to one another and, eventually, to colonists at their destinations. One of those destinations was Massachusetts, which was a center of the early slave trade. The first slaves had arrived in Massachusetts in 1638, and by 1700, about 1,000 slaves lived in the colony, most in Boston.
In 1706, an enslaved West African man was purchased for the prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather by his congregation. Mather gave him the name Onesimus, after a Biblical slave whose name meant “useful.” Mather, who had been a powerful figure in the Salem Witch Trials, believed that slave owners had a duty to convert slaves to Christianity and educate them. But like other white men of his era, he also looked down on what he called the “Devilish rites” of Africans and worried that enslaved people might openly rebel.
Mather didn’t trust Onesimus: He wrote about having to watch him carefully due to what he thought was “thievish” behavior, and recorded in his diary that he was “wicked” and “useless.” But in 1716, Onesimus told him something he did believe: That he knew how to prevent smallpox.
Onesimus, who “is a pretty intelligent fellow,” Mather wrote, told him he had had smallpox—and then hadn’t. Onesimus said that he “had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it...and whoever had the courage to use it was forever free of the fear of contagion.”
The operation Onesimus referred to consisted of rubbing pus from an infected person into an open wound on the arm. Once the infected material was introduced into the body, the person who underwent the procedure was inoculated against smallpox. It wasn’t a vaccination, which involves exposure to a less dangerous virus to provoke immunity. But it did activate the recipient’s immune response and protected against the disease most of the time.
Mather was fascinated. He verified Onesimus’ story with that of other enslaved people, and learned that the practice had been used in Turkey and China. He became an evangelist for inoculation—also known as variolation—and spread the word throughout Massachusetts and elsewhere in the hopes it would help prevent smallpox.
Cotton Mather.
Corbis/Getty Images
But Mather hadn’t bargained on how unpopular the idea would be. The same prejudices that caused him to distrust his servant made other white colonists reluctant to undergo a medical procedure developed by or for black people. Mather “was vilified,” historian Ted Widmer told WGBH. “A local newspaper, called TheNew England Courant, ridiculed him. An explosive device was thrown through his windows with an angry note. There was an ugly racial element to the anger.” Religion also contributed: Other preachers argued that it was against God’s will to expose his creatures to dangerous diseases.
But in 1721, Mather and Zabdiel Boylston, the only physician in Boston who supported the technique, got their chance to test the power of inoculation. That year, a smallpox epidemic spread from a ship to the population of Boston, sickening about half of the city’s residents. Boylston sprang into action, inoculating his son and his slaves against the disease. Then, he began inoculating other Bostonians. Of the 242 people he inoculated, only six died—one in 40, as opposed to one in seven deaths among the population of Boston who didn’t undergo the procedure.
The smallpox epidemic wiped out 844 people in Boston, over 14 percent of the population. But it had yielded hope for future epidemics. It also helped set the stage for vaccination. In 1796, Edward Jenner developed an effective vaccine that used cowpox to provoke smallpox immunity. It worked. Eventually, smallpox vaccination became mandatory in Massachusetts.
Did Onesimus live to see the success of the technique he introduced to Mather? It isn’t clear. Nothing is known of his later life other than that he partially purchased his freedom. To do so, writes historian Steven J. Niven, he gave Mather money to purchase another slave. What is clear is that the knowledge he passed on saved hundreds of lives—and led to the eventual eradication of smallpox.
In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox entirely eradicated due to the spread of immunization worldwide. It remains the only infectious disease to have been entirely wiped out.
Were you there when on the first play from scrimmage Raiders QB Terrelle Pryor took it 93-yards to the house on a quarterback keep against the visiting Pittsburgh Steelers? I Was! And I've been calling him T-Pain ever since.
On that day the Oakland Coliseum was packed with visiting Steelers fans and the atmosphere was combative as usual. I remember not believing my ears and eyes when I first heard cheers then finally saw everyone pointing at Pryor galloping free and untouched, like a gazelle, through an opened forest of Steelers. The majority of fans and Raiders alike were as fooled as the Steelers defense. The cheering had to be one of the longest and loudest to ever accompany a Raiders touchdown. At the time it was the longest run for a touchdown by any quarterback in NFL history.
I miss Football. I miss my Raiders. After talking to a relative in Las Vegas this morning I learned that their new stadium roof hasn't been completed, and with stoppage of construction due to the coronavirus outbreak it may not be ready should there be a 2020 NFL season. Could that mean a return to Oakland for a Raiders final finale season? I'd risk social un-distancing to relive watching the Greatness of the Raiders in Oaktown once more. I'd run as fast and true as T-Pain did against the Steelers in order to get in line for a game ticket at the Oakland Coliseum. I think many a fan would take a chance against viral infection just to see the silver and black return home for another season or game(s). We've worn face masks to past games in Oakland to protect against smoke drifting in on autumn winds from burning California wildfires. Nothing can stop Raiders fans from seeing their team play. Of course you realize these are simply the rantings of a weeks long “Shelter-in-Place” football fan who’s reliving and dreaming of seeing his team play again. In reality, social distancing, washing hands and wearing masks are the guidelines all pirates need to follow in order to protect themselves, their loved ones and their communities during this coronavirus covid-19 pandemic. The Silver & Black will always be welcome back to Oakland. But all lives matter too much to jeopardize the health and well-being of any Raider Nation pirate; especially those with weather beaten faces and bristling black mustaches! Who Love's Ya Baby?
“The guilt rests on humanity itself. . . on the
apparently inexhaustible capacity for greed and numbness of heart and the
infliction of suffering that survives in the nature of man.” ~Malcolm
Cowley Africans were brought to North and South America as
the result of a gigantic commercial operation that lasted the better part of
four centuries; an operation responsible for untold suffering and the deaths of
millions of African men, women, and children.
Drawing heavily on journals, state
documents, business ledgers, and memoirs, authors Mannix and Cowley provide a
thorough and formidable review of the slave trade's execrable history ― its
origins, rapid expansion, pinnacle, decline, and eventual abolishment. Black
Cargoes traces in meticulous detail how the business was run, who financed it,
and an explanation of the complex and profitable interactions of merchants and
governments which eventually resulted in the rise of the plantation system, the
maritime trade in New England, and the means to finance the industrial
revolution in England and France. Above all the authors rigorously examine the
forced submission of generations of Africans, slave raids, barracoons and
coffles, the appalling conditions onboard ship for both Africans and seamen.
The inexplicable cruelty of slave traders and their collaboration with African
leaders.
The decades of struggle abolitionists faced with indifferent
politicians, plantation owners, and businessmen who turned their backs on the
anguish of countless victims. While it can be said that Atlantic slave trade
changed the history of the world, it did so at an unspeakable cost –
precipitating the dissolution and disintegration of an entire continent's
societies..
To current generations, facts about
the Atlantic slave trade may hold few surprises. However, at the time of its
publication, Black Cargoes was the first general history of the Atlantic trade
to be written since the turn of the century over 60 years before. Grim
and gripping history, Black Cargoes remains one of the most historically
significant treatise of the Atlantic slave trade of its time.
