African-American Contributions to Science and Industry

And They Studied Man and Nature

In science and, to a lesser extend, in industrial invention, Negros have distinguished themselves. In 1770, the remarkable Banjamin Banneker of Maryland made the first American clock which struck off the hours. Henry T. Blair, also of Maryland became the first Negro to receive a patent when his corn harvester was registered in 1835. Norbert Rillieux's work on evaporation and the liquid reduction process, in the opinion of some, has been "the greatest in the history of American chemical engineering."

The Negro has been active in the field of medical science for a long time. As early at 1667 one Lucas Santomée of New York was trained in medicine in Holland and practiced under the Dutch and British. A slave by the name of Oneissimus provided Americans with an effective antitote for smallpox in 1721. In this same era, another slave, James Derham of Philadelphia, became the first American Negro medical doctor. As a freedman, he built up a large interracial clientele in New Orleans during the 1780s. James McCune Smith received a medical degree from Scotland's Glasgow University in 1837. David J. Peck had the distinction of being the first Negro to graduate from an American medical school when Rush Medical College of Chicago awarded him the M.D. degree in 1847. Two years after this John V. DeGrasse and Thomas J. White were graduated from Bowdoin College with degrees in the field of medicine. In recognition of his extraordinary ability, DeGrasse was admitted to the Boston Medical Society in 1854.

In the years following the Civil war the number of Negroes in the medical profession slowly increased. Twenty one years after Peck became a doctor, the Howard University Medical School opened its doors in Washington, D.C. Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee began training Negro physicians in 1876. By the year 1900 there were 1,734 Negros licensed to practice the art of healing.

In the area of pure scientific research Negroes have only just begun to work in significant numbers. Yet, from the early days of this nation, a few Negroes have possessed the objective curiosity and opportunity to learn for the sake of learning, as in the case of the self-trained Banneker who calculated solar eclipses and the cycle of the seventeen-year locust. Edward Bouchet was among the first to pursue a scientific interest ("Measuring Refractive Indices") to the doctoral level when Yale University awarded him the Ph.D. degree in 1876. Beginning in the first decade of this century, Dr. Charles Turner published forty-seven learned papers even though he never held a position higher than that of biology teacher in a St. Louis, Missouri high school.

All born since the turn of the century, the men enumerated in the following list have achieved distinction in different scientific fields: Harold E. Finley (cytology and the physiology of portozoa), Smuel M. Nabrit (embryology), Lloyd A. Hall (cereal chemistry and protein hydrolysates), Warren E. Henry (cryogenics, thermodynamics and semi-conductors), Julius H. Taylor (electrical properties of semi-conductors and high pressure physics), Hubert M. Thaxon (theoretical physics and information theory), David H. Blackwell and Joseph A. Pierce (statistics and the study of probability) and Wade Ellis (abstract algebra and electromagnetic theory).

The list could be extended by noting such men as J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr. who earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the Univeristy of Chicago at the age of nineteen; or Dr. Robert P. Barnes of Howard University whose students, according to one authority, at one point were publishing more articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society than all of the chemistry professors in all of the Negro colleges combined; or Dr. Lloyd E. Ferguson, also of Howard University, who authored a chemistry text which has been used by many colleges in the country.

It is perhaps in the field of general medicine that a combination of inventiveness, scientific research and community services may be seen most clearly. Dr. Louis T. Wright, a pioneer in the use of antibiotic aureomycin on human beings, was a vigorous opponent of discrimination in the medical profession. Dr. William A. Hinton, a long-time member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, developed what is known as the "Hinton Test" for syphilis. He once headed the Wasserman Laboratory of the Massachusetts Department of Health. Dr. Peter Marshall Murray, a specialist in gynecology, became the first Negro member of the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association. Julian Lewis, armed with both an M.D. and a Ph.D., for a time was on the faculty of the University of Chicago and, later, a professional pathology with client-hospitals in the Chicago area.

The caliber of men now in medicine may bee seen in the examples listed below. Dr. Nathaniel O. Calloway is a widely recognized specialist in internal medicine, the author of many scientific papers, a community leader and hospital administrator. W. Montague Cobb, an outstanding anatomist at Howard University, has been a vice-president of the American Academy of Science and president of the American Association of Physical Antropologists. Asa. G. Yancey is director of surgery at the Hughes Spalding Pavilion of the Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Leonidas H. berry holds a professorship of gastroenterology at Chicago's Cook County Hospital

The above paragraphs merely outline, in an extremely brief compass, the variety and scope of the Negro's participation in the development of certain phases of industry, science and medicine.

Be sure to read about how other minority and female scientists have contributed to science and industry, and how African-American inventors helped shape our history and make our world what it is today.