Reclaiming our Past

Abstract

One day my son came home with a report card containing a D-minus in physics. He offered this explanation: people don't do well in science. When I calmed down, I reminded him that Black scientists and inventors have been serving this nation for generations. For example, George Washington Carver saved the soil of the land that had enslaved him by teaching farmers to rotate their cotton crops with peanuts. Elijah McCoy invented a lubricating cup to oil trains in motion. And Garrett Morgan developed a gas mask that saved thousands in World War I. My son got the message. On the next report card he had an A-plus. Terry goes on to say that while he was growing up he had an opportunity to be exposed to athletes and entertainers who were Black, but he missed the stories in the schoolbooks and movies of the range of contributions by Black Americans, including those in science and engineering. There is a proud history of Blacks in science and invention, yet much of it is obscure and unknown. Names such as Charles Drew, Daniel Hale Williams, Ernest Everett Just, Louis Latimer, and Granville T. Woods are becoming somewhat better known and their contributions better recognized. Beyond these and a few other contributors, however, not much is known about the early participation of Blacks in science and technology. Many people do not realize that the first Black to receive a PhD from an American university did so in physics. In 1876, 15 years after Yale became the first American university to confer a doctorate in science, Edward Bouchet received his doctorate in physics from that institution for his dissertation, On Measuring Refracting Indices. Bouchet was 24 years old and only the sixth person in the United States to be awarded a PhD in physics. Nonetheless, as Bechtel states in his introductory chapter to the recently published Blacks, Science and American Education (Pearson & Bechtel, 1989): . .other than an occasional footnote in the history of Black education, Bouchet and his accomplishments remain virtually unknown to the world of science and literally unheard of by the world in general. The brief glimpse that Bechtel provides of Bouchet's life and the lives of other Blacks who pursued science in those early years gives us important insight into today's problems of attracting Blacks to and preparing them for science and engineering.