LM Highlights 3 Accomplished Scientists in Honor of Black History Month

Historian Carter G. Woodson started the first Black History Week in February 1926 through the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). Decades later in 1976, this commemoration of black history in the United States was expanded by ASALH to Black History Month, also known as African American History Month, and President Ford issued the first Message on the Observance of Black History Month that same year.

Every year since, it is custom for the president to issue a Presidential Proclamation to underscore the importance of recognizing the contributions that African Americans have made to American history in their struggles for freedom and equality in an effort to deepen our understanding of our nation's history.

This Black History Month, LM wants to recognize three of the many Black scientists, physicists, engineers, and technicians who contributed to the success of one of the most significant scientific achievements of the twentieth century — the Manhattan Project. Conducted in secrecy to preserve national security, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Manhattan Engineering District recruited the nations’ greatest minds to develop and build the atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project began in early 1942, and the project quickly grew into a nationwide network of laboratories and storage and processing facilities. Four sites in particular would emerge as central to the mission: the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, the Hanford Reservation in Washington state; and the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) in Chicago.

The Met Lab, based at the University of Chicago, was under the leadership of Arthur Compton, who supported an egalitarian approach to hiring Manhattan Project scientists. The Met Lab recruited and hired 12 African American scientists and technicians who worked alongside their white counterparts in efforts to understand the fission process, the science behind the atomic bomb. Two of the 12 were J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. and George Warren Reed.

Wilkins was a prominent mathematician and physicist, who’s academic and professional accomplishments began at the age of 13 when he would become one of the youngest undergraduates at the University of Chicago. After completing his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at age 17, he continued his studies, earning his master’s degree the next year and completing his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1942 at the age of 19, becoming the seventh African American to obtain that degree from the University of Chicago.

Wilkins taught mathematics at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before being recruited to the Met Lab in 1944, where he would work in collaboration with Compton and Enrico Fermi, researching methods for producing fissionable nuclear materials, focusing on plutonium-239. In the fall 1944, Wilkins's team was scheduled for transfer to Oak Ridge, but Jim Crow laws (state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the southern states), prevented him from taking up a scientific post at the east Tennessee site.

Instead, Wilkins was recommended for a position with Eugene Wigner, who was researching the design and development of nuclear reactors that would convert uranium into weapons-grade plutonium. Their research would eventually become the science behind the Wigner-Wilkins approach for estimating the distribution of neutron energies within nuclear reactors.

Wilkins would go on to hold a variety of positions at the Nuclear Development Corporation of America (later the United Nuclear Corporation) and oversaw a range of research and development projects with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

The importance of Wilkins’s work in the area of physics, mathematics, and nuclear science would earn him high accolades and honors over the course of his career, including serving as the president of the American Nuclear Society, became the second African American to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest honors an engineer can receive. He was also a visiting scientist and Distinguished Fellow at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. He retired in 2003 and passed away at the age of 87 on May 1, 2011.

Reed was chemist who also worked at the University of Chicago Met Lab. Reed earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in chemistry from Howard University prior to being recruited to the Manhattan Project. At the Met Lab, Reed began what would become a major part of his life’s work — researching radiation patterns of uranium and plutonium. His research focused on the fission yields of uranium and thorium to determine their viability for a nuclear chain reaction, work that had an immediate impact on the construction of the atomic bomb.

After the end of the Manhattan Project, Reed completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1952 and stayed on to work in the chemistry division of the Argonne National Laboratory, where he continued to research radiation patterns of uranium and plutonium. After World War II, Reed held several positions outside of nuclear chemistry, turning his eyes to the stars. From 1972 to 1980, he was on the lunar sample planning team with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This team of scientists analyzed lunar rock brought back from the recent NASA missions. Reed used a nuclear reactor to determine that the lunar rock contained minerals not found on earth.

Over the course of his career, Reed would go on to publish over 120 scientific papers, and for his work on the space program, Reed was the recipient of NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. In 2006, Reed’s son, Mark Morrison-Reed, interviewed him about family life, his work on the Manhattan Project, the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his position at Argonne National Laboratory. The interview was graciously donated by Mark Morrison-Reed to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Reed passed away at the age of 94 on August 31, 2015.

Approximately 300 miles away from Wilkins’ and Reed’s work at the Met Lab, a research physicist named Carolyn B. Parker was busy at work on the Dayton Project, conducting Manhattan Project work focused on the radioactive element polonium. Parker earned her bachelor’s from Fisk University in 1938, where she later became an assistant professor in physics. After her undergraduate studies, she went on to earn a master’s in mathematics from University of Michigan in 1941, prior to joining the Dayton Project in Ohio. Parker was only in her twenties when she was recruited for her superb mathematical and scientific skills to work as a research physicist. In 1943, Parker’s team was tasked with separating and purifying polonium, the element that was used as the initiator for the fission chain reaction in the atomic bomb and early atomic weapons. The work of Parker’s team contributed to the development of the initiator used in the Trinity Test in New Mexico in July 1945, and in the Fat Man device that was dropped on Nagasaki later in 1945.

Parker’s research on polonium would continue after the end of World War II at the AEC Mound Laboratory, established to consolidate and to continue the polonium-related work being done at the Dayton Project locations. Parker continued her work as a research physicist for aircraft research and construction at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, before taking a position as a professor at her old undergraduate school, Fisk University.

In 1951, she entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics graduate program where she earned a second master’s degree in 1953. She is considered the first African American woman known to earn a postgraduate degree in physics, as well as the first African American to earn a postgraduate degree in physics at MIT. During her Ph.D. studies she was employed by the Air Force Cambridge Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a leading research laboratory.

Despite finishing the coursework for her Ph.D. in physics, leukemia prevented Parker from completing her doctoral program. In 2008, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health determined that leukemia was an occupational risk of working with polonium, the likely cause of Parker’s illness. She passed away at the age of 48 on March 3, 1966.

Without the groundbreaking contributions of Wilkins and Reed at the Met Lab, and Parker with the Dayton Project, the Manhattan Project would not have achieved success in the timeframe necessary to secure the end of World War II. Without the continued scientific achievements of these individuals, modern nuclear science, space exploration, and aviation would not look the same. This Black History Month, LM honors and celebrates the lives of these extraordinary contributors to the Manhattan Project and beyond.