Imagine that you are a prominent and successful African-American research chemist with multiple patents. You have just been voted “Chicagoan of the Year” in a poll by the Chicago Sun-TImes. You and your family are among the first people of color to buy a home in a white community in a Chicago suburb. It’s Thanksgiving.
You haven’t moved in yet, but your house is firebombed. That’s not much to give thanks about.
Once you move in, imagine that this happens again, six months later, when someone tosses dynamite into your house. Sometimes there are crosses put on your lawn.
You’re forced to hire armed guards and guard your home at night yourself with a shotgun, sitting in a tree, sometimes joined by your young son.
This pattern of racism is something you’ve faced your entire career, as you were first denied academic appointments, then industry jobs. As your children grow up, they will face issues in school, where they are among the few black students.
But now imagine that the community where your home was firebombed decides to stand behind you and welcome you as one of its most admired citizens. Many of these townspeople will stand with you, guarding your home against further attack. After all, you’ve become one of the most brilliant and successful scientists in the entire United States.
This is the story of Percy Julian, whose home in Oak Park, Illinois, was firebombed on Thanksgiving Day in 1950.
Throughout his career, Julian was shut out of many teaching and industry positions despite his academic credentials. Julian would go on to become only the second African-American admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, in 1973.
Percy Lavon Julian was born in 1899 in Montgomery, Ala. There was no high school nearby for black students to attend, so he had to take remedial courses before he started college. He studied chemistry at DePauw University, a school with few black students, only to find that he was not allowed to live on campus. He experienced hardships even finding a place that would serve him meals—he was not allowed to eat with other students at a boarding house, and he finally found lodging in a fraternity where he slept in the attic while he stoked the building’s furnaces and did odd jobs. Despite all this, Julian graduated Phi Beta Kappa and as class valedictorian.
Yet Julian was denied entry into graduate school. He worked as an instructor of chemistry at Fisk University, finally winning a fellowship to pursue graduate studies at Harvard. But he couldn’t continue the path to a doctorate, as Harvard withdrew the offer to become a teaching assistant. School officials thought undergraduates would not like being taught by an African-American. Julian started teaching at Howard University and other black colleges, finally getting a Rockefeller fellowship to earn a PhD in chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1931. He became fluent in German, which served him well when he helped Jewish refugees escape from Nazis.
Julian returned to DePauw to continue his research, for which he won international acclaim. But DePauw would not give him a professorship because of his race.
He instead sought jobs in the chemical industry. There, too, despite his research and academic credentials, he was turned down at many companies because he was black. He finally landed a position at the Glidden Company in Chicago as assistant director of research in 1936. He became the full director before leaving the company in 1953, heading up the firm’s soy division.
In 1953 Julian founded Julian Laboratories. He sold it for more than $2.3 million in 1961, the equivalent of nearly $18 million today. Later, he established the Julian Research Institute, a nonprofit where he worked the rest of his life as a human rights and civil rights advocate.
Julian’s scientific accomplishments are too numerous to detail. Among his discoveries, inventions, and honors:
- The chemical synthesis of physostigmine from the calabar bean to create a drug treatment for glaucoma.
- The synthesis of cortisone, which was used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.
- The development of Aero-Foam, a product that uses soy protein to put out oil and gas fires, which was used widely in World War II on Navy ships.
- The use of soy beans to produce, cheaply and in mass quantities, artificial hormones, or "sterols,” with applications in cortisone and birth control pills.
- Eighteen honorary degrees.
- The NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1947 for distinguished achievement by an African-American.
- The establishment of the Percy L. Julian Award for Pure and Applied Research in Science and Engineering, given out each year by the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers, after his death in 1975.
- Induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990.
- Getting his image on a commemorative stamp in 1993.
- Becoming a Google doodle in 2014.
Julian was the subject of a 2007 documentary from PBS’ NOVA series called Forgotten Genius:
Even though Julian never was accepted as a faculty member at DePauw University, in 1980, the science and mathematics building at DePauw was rededicated as the Percy L. Julian Mathematics and Science Center. In all, nine schools named buildings in Julian’s honor. A middle school in Oak Park is now named for Percy Julian.
Julian’s son, Percy Julian Jr., the boy who joined his father in the tree to protect his home, became a prominent civil rights attorney. And Julian’s daughter, Faith, still lives in Oak Park today in her family home, the one that got firebombed on Thanksgiving in 1950.