Next Steps

This book relates the stories of some amazing women who are currently working as chemists or are recently retired. These women, as I have said before, are hiding in plain sight. Perhaps the first or the only woman of color to work in a particular lab or university, they all managed to succeed in spite of any obstacles they faced. This chapter presents some ideas as to what you can do in order to succeed if you, your child, grandchild, or students might be interested in a STEM career, especially in chemistry. I highly recommend reading Dr. Sandra L. Hanson’s book, Swimming against the Tide: African American Girls and Science Education. Dr. Hanson studied young African American girls in high school and their attitudes toward science, which has traditionally been a male profession. One of her conclusions is that these young girls need to see or read about role model, an African American woman chemist. Swimming against the Tide was written before the explosion of the World Wide Web and web-based materials, so this conclusion may no longer hold. For example, information about most of the women in this book is available on the web; some of them have given talks that are also on the web. Many of the women whose stories are told here work to mentor young minority students. These web based materials can be accessed by the students and teachers. The primary organization that focuses on careers in chemistry is the ACS. What is chemistry? It is a branch of science that provides opportunities for a variety of careers, not just working in a research laboratory making new chemicals. According to the ACS, “In simplest terms, chemistry is the science of matter, for example anything that can be touched, tasted, smelled, seen or felt is made of chemicals.” The ACS website has information on chemistry careers, including videos of the different jobs that chemists do, and information on various technical disciplines, as well as profiles of many chemists, including one whose life story is in this book.

Chemists Who Work for the National Labs or Other Federal Agencies

Dr. Patricia Carter Sluby (Fig. 5.1) is a primary patent examiner retired from the US Patent and Trademark Office and formerly a registered patent agent. She is also the author of three books about African American inventors and their patented inventions. Patricia’s father is William A. Carter Jr., and her mother is Thelma LaRoche Carter. Her father was the first black licensed master plumber in Richmond, VA, and his father also had the same distinction in Columbus, OH, years earlier. Her father was born in Philadelphia, PA, and attended college. Her grandfather went from Virginia to look for work in Canada and became a stonemason. Later he relocated back to the United States, where he soon married in Boston, MA, and several of his children were born there. Later, the family moved to Philadelphia where Patricia’s father was born. Her mother, who attended Hampton Institute, taught school and later managed the office for Patricia’s father’s business. Patricia’s mother was born and raised in Richmond, as were most of her maternal relatives. Patricia had three brothers. They were all born during segregation in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Patricia was born on February 15, in Richmond. She attended kindergarten through eighth grade in segregated schools that were within walking distance of home. In school, they studied from hand-me-down books, but her black teachers were well trained and well informed. They had bachelor’s degrees; some had master’s or even PhD degrees. To go to high school, Patricia took a city bus across to the east side of town, to the newly built school for black students, which incorporated eighth grade through twelfth grade. Her teachers were excellent instructors who lived in her neighborhood and knew her parents quite well. The teachers looked out for the neighborhood kids and acted as surrogate parents out­side the confines of the home. Teachers and principals were also great mentors, dedicated to their craft; they encouraged students to understand the world and function as responsible adults. Patricia excelled in science and math.

Chemists Who Work in Academia

Etta Gravely (Fig. 3.1) is a retired professor of chemistry and former head of the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina A&T State University at Greensboro (North Carolina A&T). Etta was born on August 30, 1939, in Alamance County, NC. Now the town of Green Level, it was then a rural community near Burlington. Most of the people there farmed, raising tobacco. Everyone had private gardens and Etta’s grandmother canned their food. The area where she went to school is still very rural; the school building is now the town hall. Etta’s mother was Kate Lee McBroom and her father Rufus Leith. Her mother, a homemaker, did general house cleaning for families. Her father had a high school degree, had served in the army during World War II, and worked as an orderly in a hospital. Etta is the only child of her mother, but her father had a son named Frederick Leith. Her brother went to Graham Central high school and upon graduation went into the army and subsequently died. Etta did not go to kindergarten because there was none. She started school in the first grade in a four-room school that had classes for grades one and two, three and four, five and six, and seven and eight. The principal was Mrs. Mary Holne, and there were three other teachers, each teaching two grades. Since Etta loved to read and liked to do school work, she skipped fourth grade and went on to fifth grade: fourth and third grade were taught in the same room, and when she completed her third- grade work she would do fourth-grade work. Her teachers probably had bachelor’s or master’s degrees in their subjects. Both Etta’s school and community were segregated; she went to school in 1945, before the Brown vs. Board of Education act, which was Supreme Court decision. When Etta graduated from the country school, she was bused to Pleasant Grove High School—for African American students, five miles from the high school for white students. The school taught grades one through twelve; the curriculum was the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Chemists Who Work in Industry

Dr. Dorothy J. Phillips (Fig. 2.1) is a retired industrial chemist and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACS. Dorothy Jean Wingfield was born in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27, 1945, the third of eight children, five girls and three boys. She was the second girl and is very close to her older sister. Dorothy grew up in a multi- generational home as both her grandmothers often lived with them. Her father, Reverend Robert Cam Wingfield Sr., born in 1905, was a porter at the Greyhound Bus station and went to school in the evenings after he was called to the ministry. He was very active in his church as the superintendent of the Sunday school; he became a pastor after receiving an associate’s degree in theology and pastoral studies from the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Her mother, Rebecca Cooper Wingfield, occasionally did domestic work. On these occasions, Dorothy’s maternal grandmother would take care of the children. Dorothy’s mother was also very active in civic and school activities, attending the local meetings and conferences of the segregated Parent Teachers Association (PTA) called the Negro Parent Teachers Association or Colored PTA. For that reason, she was frequently at the schools to talk with her children’s teachers. She also worked on a social issue with the city to move people out of the dilapidated slum housing near the Capitol. The town built government subsidized housing to relocate people from homes which did not have indoor toilets and electricity. She was also active in her Baptist church as a Mother, or Deaconess, counseling young women, especially about her role as the minister’s wife. When Dorothy went to school in 1951, Nashville schools were segregated and African American children went to the schools in their neighborhoods. But Dorothy’s elementary, junior high, and high schools were segregated even though the family lived in a predominately white neighborhood. This was because around 1956, and after Rosa Park’s bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, her father, like other ministers, became more active in civil rights and one of his actions was to move to a predominately white neighborhood.

Chemists Who Are Leaders in Academia or Organizations

Amanda Bryant-Friedrich (Fig. 4.1) is Dean of the College of Graduate Studies at the University of Toledo (Toledo). Amanda was born in Enfield, NC, a small town about fifteen miles from the North Carolina-Virginia border. Her father was a farmer and her mother was a housewife. Her father only had a sixth-grade education and did not read or write much. Her mother graduated from high school in Enfield. Her maternal grandfather was a child of a slave and her mother was one of twenty-two children from two wives. They lived on a farm owned by a man named Whitaker. As her mother’s family had been enslaved by the family that owned the farm, her last name was Whitaker. Amanda’s paternal grandfather was a businessman who owned his own farm, on the other side of town. He was also involved in the illegal production of moonshine. Amanda went to Unburden Elementary School in Enfield. Her first experience with school was dramatic, because she lived at the end of a dirt road and was really isolated from other families. The first day she went to kindergarten she saw all those little kids, and she was afraid because there were too many people there. But the daughter of her mother’s best friend was there and invited her to come in to the classroom. Her first science class was in general science in fourth or fifth grade. She was so fascinated, she changed her mind about her future career of secretary or teacher and decided on science. Amanda went to Enfield Middle school in Halifax County, then the second poorest county in the state. The school had only basic infrastructure for science classes. She remembers her middle school chemistry teacher, Ms. Crowley, who told the students to put a mercury thermometer in a cork and Amanda accidently stuck it in her hand. They did not have much in the school, but her teacher taught her what she could.

Introduction

When I wrote my first book African American Women Chemists I neglected to state that it was a historical book. I researched to find the first African American woman who had studied chemistry in college and worked in the field. The woman that I found was Josephine Silane Yates who studied chemistry at the Rhode Island Normal School in order to become a science teacher. She was hired by the Lincoln Institute in 1881 and later was, I believe, the first African American woman to become a professor and head a department of science. But then again there might be women who traveled out of the country to study because of racial prejudice in this country. The book ended with some women like myself who were hired as chemists in the industry before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Therefore, I decided to write another book about the current African American women chemists who, as I say, are hiding in plain sight. To do this, I again researched women by using the web or by asking questions of people I met at American Chemical Society ACS or National Organization for the Professional Advances of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) meetings. I asked women to tell me their life stories and allow me to take their oral history, which I recorded and which were transcribed thanks to the people at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA. Most of the stories of these women will be archived at the CHF in their oral history collection. The women who were chosen to be in this book are an amazing group of women. Most of them are in academia because it is easy to get in touch with professors since they publish their research on the web. Some have worked for the government in the national laboratories and a few have worked in industry. Some of these women grew up in the Jim Crow south where they went to segregated schools but were lucky because they were smart and had teachers and parents who wanted them to succeed despite everything they had to go through.

Life After Tenure Denial in Academia

The year 2014 was absolutely devastating for me professionally and personally; I was denied tenure and I lost both my maternal and paternal grandmothers. Reflecting back on that time in my life, I am certain that I would not have been able to survive the experience without the support of my close family and friends. I truly believe that the story of my journey will help others experiencing difficult challenges in their careers. After graduating from Henry Ford High School in Detroit, MI, in 1988, I enrolled at Highland Park Community College (HPCC) in nearby Highland Park. My mother was working as a secretary in the nursing department at the time, so I was able to take advantage of the tuition benefit offered to the college’s employees. I enrolled in a chemistry course for non-science majors, which I absolutely loved! Needless to say, after earning my associate’s degree in 1990, I decided to pursue chemistry as a major. I enrolled at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and attended two semesters before transferring to Wayne State University (WSU), in Detroit. My experiences as an undergraduate chemistry major at WSU led me on the path to pursue a doctorate in chemistry. In the fall of 1992, I was awarded an NIH-MARC (National Institutes of Health-Minority Access to Research Careers) Fellowship. This fellowship provided me not only funding support, but hands-on research training in the laboratory of Professor Regina Zibuck, a synthetic organic chemist. The environment in the Zibuck laboratory was very supportive and due to this mentoring experience, I wanted to earn a doctorate in chemistry. As a MARC Fellow, I was engaged in research and presented a poster on my research efforts at a national conference for the first time. Thus, I was developing fundamental laboratory and communication skills as an undergraduate researcher. Also during this time at WSU, I became involved in the WSU-NOBCChE chapter, where I found a supportive network of African American students pursuing undergraduate degrees in chemistry. The chapter adviser was Dr. Keith Williams, Director of Minority Student Initiatives in the chemistry department.