Brilliant Black Biologists, You NEED to Know About
Even though February and black history month is ending, it doesn’t mean that we can’t celebrate black achievements all year round. Here are four black scientists who not only made significant discoveries and contributed important work to their fields but also educated their own communities and created space so that more black people could be welcomed into the science community.
Elliot Everett Just
Elliot Everett Just is considered the first black Marine Biologist. His work focused mostly on fertilization and embryo development, especially in marine invertebrates.
Elliot was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1883 at the end of reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws in the South. His early childhood was defined by disease. Elliot contracted typhoid fever in childhood which ate through his memory, leaving him unable to read and write. This affected Elliot greatly into his late adult years; he could still perfectly remember the day he figured out how to read again.
His family moved up North to provide better opportunities for them. There he went to Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire, where he graduated a year early at the top of his class in 1903. After High School, he got accepted into Dartmouth, where he became interested in fertilization and egg development. He graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors in Botany, Sociology, and History. He was a top candidate to give the commencement speech for his class, but because he was the only black student in his grade, the professors felt like a faux pas.
Even though he received a degree from an ivy league with high honors, it was still tough to find a teaching job as he was a black man, and most colleges' faculties were all white. He eventually took a position at Howard college. He spent summers with Frank R Lillie (the head of the University of Chicago Zoology Department) at The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He came back every summer for 20 years and focused on experiments with the eggs of marine invertebrates.
In 1915 he was awarded the first NAACP Springton Medal to recognize the scientific achievements and service to his race 1916. He became the first Black man to receive a doctoral degree in zoology from a major university (Chicago University). Just became an internationally respected scientist and co-authored several scientific papers with Dr. Lillie. He struggled to rise above his race in America, where jobs were scarce for black men in science. He traveled abroad, where he found more success and less discrimination.
He became the first American to be invited to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, where Nobel prize winners (Albert Einstein and Walther Bothe) carried out their work. Ernest continuously went back to Europe for ten years, only relocating from Germany to a Paris research facility when the Nazis came to power. The Nazis even took him, prisoner, in France once they invaded. Unfortunately, when The Nazis took him, prisoner, his health had slowly been declining. Once a POW, his health only drastically became worst, only to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer after being liberated and died shortly after on October 27, 1941
Roger Arliner Young
Roger Arliner Young was born in Clifton Forge, Virginia, in 1899. Her family struggled throughout her childhood to make ends meet, and whatever money they did have went towards paying for her disabled mother's doctor bills. In 1916, Young enrolled at Howard University. She first started out studying music; however, she wasn’t a great student, and her grades were poor. One of her Professors at Howard, Ernest Everett Just, saw potential and wanted to help her with her studies. Professor Ernest Just steered her towards science which she took an immediate liking to. After switching majors and spending extra time at the university, she graduated from Howard with a Bachelors's in the Arts and Sciences in 1923.
Professor Just helped Roger Arliner Young secure funding for graduate school, which started at the University of Chicago in 1924. While there, she was invited into Sigma Xi scientific research society which was unusual honor for someone only in a master's program. In the summers, Just invited her to research with him and Dr. Frank R Lillie (the head of the Zoology Department at The University of Chicago) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Even though Young aided Just and Lillie in their research, she was never credited or appeared as a co-researcher in any of their publications. She graduated with a master's in 1926 and worked as Ernest Just’s Assistant Professor at Howard College from 1923-1935. Her first article was published in Science titled “On the Excretory Apparatus in Paramecium.” This made her the first black woman to research and professionally publish in the biology and zoology fields.
Rogers’ work in research focused on the fertilization processes in marine organisms and the process of hydration and dehydration in living cells. In 1929 she became the department head of Zoology at Howard University while the current Department head, Ernest Everett Just, was seeking grant money in Europe. Roger even damaged her eyes while continuing Just’s research using Ultraviolet rays. Young wanted to continue to follow in Just’s, her mentor, footsteps by getting her doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1929. However, in 1930, she failed her qualifying exams and disappeared from the science community altogether. After a while, she went back to teaching and researching at Howard College.
Young decided to chase after her doctorate dreams once again. This time she got into the zoology doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania under Professor Lewis Victor Heilbrunn. She graduated from the program with a doctorate in biology in 1940. Afterward, she got teaching jobs at The North Carolina College for Negros and Shaw University and teaching throughout various parts of Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana until 1959.
She contributed a great deal of scientific research to the biology and zoology fields. She studied the effects of direct and indirect radiation on sea urchin eggs, the structures that control the salt concentration in paramecium, and the hydration and dehydration of living cells. In 2005 she was recognized in a congressional resolution with four other black women in the scientific field “Who have broken through many barriers to achieving greatness in science.” There is also a Roger Arliner Young Marine Conservation Diversity Fellowship in her honor to support the black community in marine and environmental conservation.
Unfortunately, in her time, she was what we consider a silent scientist: those who produce meaningful work which was never recognized during their time. We are lucky enough to correct the past mistakes and credit her for her exemplary biology and zoology research.
She died on November 9th, 1964, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Samuel Milton Nabrit
Samuel was born February 21st, 1905, in Macon, Georgia, to a minister. He was one of eight children, all of who went on to receive college degrees. Nabrit graduated high school in 1921 as valedictorian. He went on to Moorehouse college in 1925, where he started teaching as a professor of zoology. In 1928 he received his master's degree and then completed a doctorate program at Brown University in 1932. In his program, Nabrit studied tail regeneration in injured fish and was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Brown University. He would then become the chair of the Moorehouse Biology department from 1932- 1947.
Nabrit was a founding member of the National academy of sciences Institute of Medicine. In 1955 he became a research fellow at the University of Brussels in Berlin, where he published scientific papers that remained influential in the field for decades. Some of his published works include "The Role of the Fin Rays in Tailfins of Fishes Fundulus and Goldfish," Biological Bulletin, April 1929. Fundulus and Goldfish", Biological Bulletin, April 1929, "Human Ecology in Georgia," Science Education, October 1944, and "The Negro in Science," Negro History Bulletin, January 1957. In 1955 he became the second president of Texas Southern University, where during his tenure (1955-1966), no students were expelled for participation in civil rights demonstrations
Nabrit’s accomplishments and honors come in the handfuls. He was appointed to President Eisenhower's National Science Board, President John F. Kennedys Atomic Energy commission in 1966, and the ambassador to the country Niger in Africa. He was the first African American Trustee on the board at Brown and had the Black Graduate Student Association at brown named in his honor. The next four doctoral African American candidates at Brown were all students of Nabrit's at Moorehouse College. In 1967 he founded the Southern Texas Fellowship Fund to assist African American students with their doctoral degrees.
Nabrit remained the president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1967 until he retired in 1981. In 1999 Brown honored him by adding his portrait to their wall of distinguished faculty. He died on December 30, 2003.
Sheila Minor Huff
In 2018, a picture of 39 white male scientists and 1 black female scientist at a Whaling Conference took the internet by storm. Everyone wanted to figure out who the one black female was. People suggested that she was just there as a secretary because she couldn’t possibly be involved as a scientist. It turns out that that one black female was Sheila Minor Huff. While working with Dr. Jones for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a Scientist, she got travel authorization to attend the International Conference on Biology of Whales in 1971. After that, she went onto have a 35-year prosperous career in the Federal sector as a scientist.
Sheila Minor Huff was born Sheila Diane Huff in Washington, D.C., in 1946. She is a proud product of the D.C. public school system. She grew up in a segregated part of Washington D.C. Huff was always interested in organisms from when she was a little girl. In an interview with Michele L. Simms for African Voices Magazine, she said, “When the other kids in the neighborhood were outside jumping Double Dutch, I would be watching the insects. I liked to look at them under a magnifying glass. I’d get a mayonnaise jar, collect insects, and place them in the jar.” She even remembers receiving a microscope from her Uncle as a present as a child. Huff had one teacher she particularly regards as a great inspiration in science, her 10th-grade biology teacher Melba Robinson. Robinson had a master's degree in biology and taught her class in a very professional way where she would call her students Mr. And Ms. It was the first time Sheila ever dissected a frog.
After graduating High School, she went to the mostly white and male American University where she started in Medicine. After too many racial and sexual bigotry instances, she felt she needed to move into a different field, so she chose Biology. Huff graduated in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in biology and a minor in chemistry. For her first job, she was hired by Dr. Clyde Jones, chief of the mammal division at the U.S. Fish and wildlife services. When she applied for the job, they took her on because her other assistant secretary was afraid of handling the specimens. Huff, however, had no problem with handling different specimens and organisms. Dr. Jones wanted to give her the title of GS-5 Clerk/ Typist, which would make Huff the same level as Dr. Jones's secretary. She turned that job down because of the title, she felt her job was different than just a typist, and she was right. After she turned the position down, Dr. Jones created a GS-5 Biological animal technician position just for her, which she accepted. As a Biological technician, she recorded data on North American Bats for renowned scientists.
In 1972 the Smithsonian Institutes Environmental Research Center hired her as a Gs-7/9 Research Technician. With the Institute, she conducted catch and release studies on small mammal populations on The Poper Islands and other areas around the region. She also served as a member of the Institutes Women Council. In 1973 she was accepted into a graduate program at George Mason College while working for the Institute full time. During her graduate studies, she changed jobs and was employed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as a Gs- 9/11 Biologist. In that job, she focused on writing environmental impact statements and assessments on the hydroelectric power plants. Then her job shifted once again, and she worked in the U.S. Department of the Interior as a schedule C, GS-11 to GS-14, special Agent. In this job, she traveled around the U.S., assisting the Carter Administration and Assistant Secretary of the fish and wildlife service with the implementation of major environmental programs.
She completed her master's degree in 1979 and earned her certification as a wildlife biologist. In 1980 she packed her bags and took a job at the Department of the Interior’s Regional Environment Office in Chicago. She was also a member of the Interagency Regional Response Teams, which coordinated responses to oil and hazardous materials incidents occurring in the Midwest region. Lastly, in 1994 she transferred to her hometown D.C. where she continued her work, collating written comments on major environment impact statements. She retired in 2005 after a 35-year career as a GS-14/ Step 10 Environmental Protection Specialist.
Sources:
https://www.capeandislands.org/post/life-lessons-first-african-american-marine-biologist#stream/0
https://marinemadness.blog/2020/06/19/the-black-lives-of-marine-biology/
https://www.wildbiologist.com/blog/hiddenfacesofwildlifescience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Everett_Just
https://marinemadness.blog/2020/06/19/the-black-lives-of-marine-biology/
https://www.wildbiologist.com/blog/hiddenfacesofwildlifescience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Arliner_Young
https://marinemadness.blog/2020/06/19/the-black-lives-of-marine-biology/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_M._Nabrit
https://www.brown.edu/academics/biomed/molecular-cell-biochemistry/samuel-milton-nabrit
https://marinemadness.blog/2020/06/19/the-black-lives-of-marine-biology/
https://africanvoices.com/avblog/biologist-sheila-minor-huff-shines-as-another-hidden-figure/
