Black Women, Chemistry PioneersAfrican American women staked out careers in chemistry despite racial and gender discriminationReviewed by Sharon L. Neal
When Chemical &amp;amp; Engineering News asked me to write a review of &ldquo;African American Women Chemists,&rdquo; by Jeannette E. Brown, I qualified my acceptance: &ldquo;I am biased; I want to like it,&rdquo; not only because I have a vested interest in the subject matter, but because I can&rsquo;t imagine how difficult it must have been to bring this project to fruition.
It has been several years since I first met Brown&mdash;a retired Merck &amp;amp; Co. research chemist and the 2009 Glenn E. &amp;amp; Barbara Hodson Ullyot Scholar of the Chemical Heritage Foundation&mdash;and learned of her intention to write a book recounting the life stories of the first African American women chemists. Whenever I would see her at American Chemical Society meetings, she would mention this work and I would nod and smile.
Now I worry that while I tried to look encouraging, my skepticism about her ability to complete such a book poked through. I was skeptical not only because of the small number of African American women chemistry pioneers, but also because I doubted that their lives were sufficiently documented to support a book. I could name a few African American men who had earned Ph.D.s in chemistry and had careers of distinction before affirmative action&mdash;Percy Julian, Lloyd Ferguson, and Samuel Massie, for instance&mdash;but I couldn&rsquo;t name any black women in chemistry from t