ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Physics
encouragement to apply to a white engineering or science college or university, but because my father had been
infl uenced to think about that for me by having him work at RCA. So I put my dream of being a nuclear physicist
on hold; it wasn’t on the radar screen. He had no calculus, no place for such a dream, my father.
Purdue University is about 58 miles, about 60 miles from Indianapolis. So, you know, it was a hop, skip and
jump in one sense but a giant leap depending on how you think about those things. It was reachable, but West
Lafayette boy, Lafayette, Indiana was another kind of place then. You know, when I was an undergraduate student
at Purdue University, the notion of a black student being in engineering…Now, they have a Black Student
Union…They have the National Society of Black Engineering, which is one of the strongest chapters up there.
In fact, they may have started at Purdue. But back then, you know, black students who were at Purdue were
football players or they were majoring in speech therapy in terms of the co-eds or other miscellaneous stuff.
So, anyway, I went up the road, primarily because my father said that that was a good place for me to start the
process. And that literally was the reason. I had no other sense of Purdue and had no sense of engineering as
such. I did very well there, graduated with highest honors and so on. I was the president of the Electrical Engineering
Honorary Society, which you’ve probably seen on the resume and so on. I say that only to say that
in the context where black folks just didn’t do those kind of things, I was able to fi nd some way to get in there
even fi nd some support. I couldn’t have been elected to be president of the Electrical Engineering Honor Society
without some white engineering students somehow at least recognizing me as a person, as a co-student and
so on. Lafayette, Indiana and West Lafayette, Indiana was a racist piece of the world, just like most of Indiana
was back then. I got called nigger there, too, to be sure. But it wasn’t only that, it was a vast engineering school,
of course.
Clip 5 – Princeton: I had this dream, right, remember my dream. I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. Princeton
at the time was the place in the world, not in the country, in the world, in the forefront of controlled thermal
nuclear fusion research. Controlled thermal nuclear fusion research, and that’s the whole notion of course of
capturing the nuclear combining processes that regularly go on in suns in a controlled environment to extract
energy and so on. Right, so notice the magic for me already, right. This was a facility, best in the world, major
federal investment and university draped around it, invested in looking at nuclear processes, right. I said, “Wow,
this is my dream.” I discovered and ended up doing something important, right? That is, they were concerned
about harnessing the energy of nuclear fusion to use for human application. Not bombs, for example. Not
bombs. So anyway, I applied to Princeton because that was, as far as I was concerned, the best of all possible
realizations, nuclear stuff, doing stuff [that was] important and [positive] human implication for humankind,
that they can succeed, and an excellent university…I got a fellowship, a research fellowship to Princeton based
primarily on the fact that I had excellent grades and excellent, ultimately excellent recommendations, I hope. I
never saw the letters, but I assume I did, since I had all of these other credentials from Purdue. Princeton was a
whole different universe, I mean, as Purdue was an engineering school, Princeton was a university, right, it was
an intellectual environment. It was a wholly different kind of place, I mean, Nobel Laureates all over the place,
brilliant speakers of all kinds, black, white, green, yellow, regularly in music repertory theater, a library that’s
fabulous, and a technical library that was also fabulous, not to mention just a general library of humane letters,
just one of the best in the world. So, now it was an explosion for me, intellectually, and that’s what it was. It
was - I made the break fi nally that I’d been kind of dreaming about all this time.
Clip 6 - Decision to Teach: Princeton for me was this opening up, this fl owering out intellectually into an arena
that was big enough for what I had as a dream, on the one hand, but also it was a time in which my seventies
consciousness, you know, the notion of myself as a progressive, as an activist, was developed and ultimately
matured, I guess is the only way to say that. By the time I left there, it was clear, it was clear in my mind what
I wanted to do, even though I had gone there with the aspiration of being on the forefront, innovators of controlled
nuclear fusion research, and I was going to do all these great things scientifi cally, by the time I got to
the end of that journey, I said to myself, I have mastered a fair amount of technology skills and technique and
understanding, and I want to fi nd a way to invest this in the black community. So I had a ninety-degree turn in
the road. So the fi rst job out of Princeton was not to work at some controlled thermal nuclear fusion laboratory,
but to work at Southern University Baton Rouge campus, so that’s the other trajectory of my life.
202