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Forgotten Genius -- Percy Julian
PBS/NOVA February 6, 2007
The grandson of Alabama slaves, Percy Julian met with every possible barrier in a deeply segregated America. He was a man of genius, devotion, and determination. As a black man, he was also an outsider, fighting to make a place for himself in a profession and country divided by bigotry, a man who would eventually find freedom in the laboratory. By the time of his death, Julian had risen to the highest levels of scientific and personal achievement, overcoming countless obstacles to become a world-class scientist, a self-made millionaire, and a civil-rights pioneer.
Narrator: 1939: A chemist at a Midwestern paint company makes a startling discovery, one that could improve the health of millions of people. The company wants him to stick to making paint. But this man has always gone his own way. He was the grandson of Alabama slaves. Yet he went on to become one of America's great scientists.
Helen Printy (a Julian Laboratories chemist): He had to fight to overcome the odds of being a black man in America.
John Kenly Smith (historian): The chemical world was a club and outsiders were not really all that welcome.
Peter Walton (a Julian Laboratories employee): We lived, for the most part, in a highly stressed, very competitive environment.
Narrator: Outside the laboratory, he faced challenges of a different kind.
Percy Julian (dramatization): Once the violence began, Anna and I felt we had no choice but to stay.
Percy Julian Jr.: My dad was angry when he came home and clearly ready to fight.
Percy Julian (dramatization): For more than a century we have watched the denial of elemental liberty to millions of black people in our southland.
Narrator: He found freedom in the laboratory. His science helped unlock the secret chemistry of plants, a discovery that would help relieve one of the most crippling human diseases and plunge him into one of the fiercest battles in the history of Science.
Gregory Petsko (chemist): This is one of the towering figures of chemistry in 20th Century and one of the great African-American scientists of all time.
Narrator: A brilliant chemist, a volatile personality, a man whose devotion to Science would not be denied.
Willie Pearson (sociologist): This man was "Exhibit A" of determination and never giving up.
V/O (dramatization of Senate Hearings): Please state your full name for the record.
Percy Julian (dramatization): My name is Percy Julian.
Narrator: Every spring in Oak Park, Illinois, people from all over the village would go out of their way to see the explosion of color at the home on the corner of East and Chicago Avenues.
Percy Julian Jr.: The tulips just went on forever. My dad, he'd be out there in his black beret and my sense was that he had this love affair with growing things.
Narrator: What many passersby didn't realize was that the tulip grower was also one of America's great scientists.
Percy Julian (dramatization): Well, ladies and gentleman, essentially I'm going to talk to you about 3 plants. 3 marvelous plants. 3 marvelous plants that make the words of the Psalmist come true and ring true again: "Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed like one of these."
Narrator: It was not simply the beauty of plants that captivated Percy Julian but their ability to produce an endless variety of powerful chemicals. In the 1930s, Julian set out to tap what he called the "natural laboratories" of plants. To make a new class of drugs that would help millions of people.
Percy Julian (dramatization): Spoiled? What do you mean spoiled?
Narrator: Julian fought through extraordinary obstacles to make a place for himself in a profession and a country divided by race.
James Anderson (historian): The message from white society is very clear. It is not your achievement or your merit or your accomplishments that matter. It's the color of your skin. And because of that you're rejected.
Gregory Petsko: Yet over and over again, he doesn't let this stop him. He presses on, sure that his vision of where he wants to go and how he wants to get there is right.
James Shoffner (chemist): After Percy Julian, nobody could say anymore that blacks couldn't do science because he was at the very top of his profession.
Percy Julian (dramatization): The story I will tell you tonight is a story of wonder and amazement. Almost a story of miracles. It is a story of laughter and tears. It is a story of human beings. Therefore, a story of meanness, of stupidity, of kindness and nobility.
One beautiful morning when I was 12 years old, I went berry-picking on my grandfather's farm in Alabama. I shall never forget how beautiful life seemed to me that morning, under the spell of an Alabama forest. But in the midst of that beauty, I came across a Negro body hanging from a tree. He had been lynched a few hours earlier. He didn't look like a criminal. He just looked like a scared boy.
On the way back, I encountered and killed a rattlesnake. For years afterward every time I saw a white man, I involuntarily saw the contours of a rattlesnake head on his face. Many years later, a reporter asked me what were my greatest nightmares from my childhood in the South. I told him: "White folks and rattlesnakes."
Narrator: Percy Lavon Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899 at a time when southerners lived under a system of forced segregation called 'Jim Crow'.
James Anderson: I think the greatest consequence of Jim Crow is fear. You knew if you said the wrong thing or went in the wrong door or drank out of the wrong water fountain... That any of those things could lead to your death.
Narrator: To shelter his children from this oppressive atmosphere, Julian's father turned to the world of ideas.
Percy Julian (dramatization): Every penny my father could scrape together went into building a wonderful library for his children because the public library was closed to us. My father created, in my imagination, brave new worlds to conquer.
Narrator: As a young man, James Julian had been a schoolteacher. His wife Elizabeth was a teacher, too. They believed education offered the path to a better life for black people.
Denied his own chance to go to college, James made it his mission to send his children instead. But it would not be easy. In Montgomery and across most of the South, public schools for black children simply stopped after the 8th grade.
James Anderson: The message from white society to black students was that you should have just enough education to be good field hands and good laborers, cooks, and maids and so forth.
Narrator: With no high school to attend, Percy Julian completed 2 years at the local teacher training school for Negroes. In 1916 with barely a 10th grade education, Percy Julian became the first member of his family to live out his father's dream.
Percy Julian (dramatization): During the hectic week of preparations, my father had taken me aside for a long talk. "This is the greatest moment of your life," he told me. "But it is also a great responsibility for you are now beginning to create a family. A family of educated people."
There they were. 3 generations of hope and prayer waving to a 4th generation that was going off to college! And why? Because they had the simple faith that the last great hope of the Earth is education for all the people.
Narrator: Julian's destination was DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana. DePauw had accepted a few black students since the Civil War but expected them to "know their place".
James Anderson: A black student entering a white university … If they didn't know before they arrived, they found out pretty quickly that they were not welcome in the university or in the community.
Narrator: Instead of being assigned to a dorm like his white classmates, Julian was shown to an off-campus room with a slop jar for a toilet.
Percy Julian (dramatization): I soon got up enough courage to ask Mrs. Townsend what time we would have dinner. But she tersely informed me that she was not expected to give me my meals.
Narrator: Julian wandered the streets of Greencastle for a day-and-a-half before finding a diner that would serve a Negro.
He would continue to take his meals off-campus until he learned of an opening at the Sigma Chi fraternity. In exchange for waiting on his housemates and firing their furnace, Julian could have a room in the basement. He soon felt at ease in the fraternity. But the classroom was a different matter.
James Anderson: You sit in a classroom with kids who have read things that you never heard of. They've taken math courses that you haven't taken. And so one of the academic challenges is trying to hold on until you can catch up.
Narrator: For 2 years, Julian would take remedial classes at a local high school in addition to his normal course load.
Percy Julian (dramatization): I remember writing to my father: "I know you and Mother have always known what was best for me. But I think you made a mistake by sending me to compete with these white students. They are so brilliant that I am always hopelessly behind."
Narrator: But by his sophomore year, Julian was gaining fast on his white classmates thanks in part to the encouragement of chemistry professor William Blanchard. Blanchard had what one student called "a contagious enthusiasm for discovering the unknown." Under his tutelage, Julian began to dream of a career as a research chemist.
Only one African-American had ever earned a doctorate in chemistry. His name was St. Elmo Brady. Julian decided that if Brady could do it, so could he. After 4 years, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and first in his class.
Percy Julian (dramatization): At commencement time, my great-grandmother bared her shoulders and she showed me -- for the first time -- the deep scars that had remained from a beating she had received when one day during the waning days of the Civil War she went through the Negro quarters and cried out: "Get yourselves ready, children. The Yankees are coming. The Lord has heard our prayers!"
And then proudly she took my Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said: "This is worth all the scars."
Narrator: Encouraged by Percy's success, his father moved the whole family north to Greencastle to send the rest of the children to DePauw. Eventually, Julian's 2 brothers would become doctors and his 3 sisters would earn master's degrees.
Percy Julian (dramatization): I shall never forget an anxious week of waiting in 1920 to see if I would get into graduate school. I stood by as day-by-day my fellow students in chemistry said: "I am going to Illinois", "I'm going to Ohio State", or "I'm going to Michigan." "Where are you going?" they asked. And they answered for me: "You must be waiting for the Harvard plum!"
I could stand the suspense no longer. I went to Professor Blanchard. And there he showed me numerous letters from men who had really meant "god" to me, great American chemists of their day. "Discourage your bright colored lad," they wrote. "We couldn't get him a job when he's done and it'll only mean frustration. Why don't you find him a teaching job in a Negro college in the South? He doesn't need a Ph.D. for that."
James Anderson: What happened to Julian was something that would have been common throughout the land. To have a good college education was way beyond anything that one would expect for an African-American. And so there's the sense that he'd had enough. "Stop here. Be content with this. Go back and teach your people."
Narrator: In 1920, Julian reluctantly returned to the South to teach. But he clung to the dream of earning his Ph.D. At 21, he was embarking on a quest that would last more than 10 years.
His first stop was Fisk University in Nashville, one of the best Negro colleges in the country. His idol -- St. Elmo Brady -- had studied at Fisk. But Julian chafed at the limitations of the black college system. Overcrowded classrooms, inadequate libraries, and poorly equipped laboratories.
After 2 years, he was on the move again. Julian had won a scholarship to study chemistry at one of America's most famous universities.
Percy Julian (dramatization): No Negro has yet obtained his master's degree in chemistry at Harvard. And so I'm up against a hard situation again.
James Anderson: When Julian arrived at Harvard in 1922, the racial climate was probably worse than it had been at any point in the 20th Century.
Narrator: President Abbott Lawrence Lowell had set the tone by banning black students from the dorms in Harvard Yard.
Julian sailed through his first year and earned his master's degree in the spring of 1923.
He continued his studies for 3 more years but left Harvard without his doctorate. Years later, he would bitterly tell friends he had been denied the teaching assistantship he needed to stay in school.