Percy Julian

Percy Lavon Julian was born April 11, 1899, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father was a railroad mail clerk, his mother was a school teacher, and his grandparents were former slaves. Julian grew up in the time of the Jim Crow culture. Among his childhood memories was finding a lynched man hanged from a tree while walking in the woods near his home. He attended school through the eighth grade but there were no high schools open to black students. The family moved to Montgomery where he attended high school at the State Normal School for Negroes. Julian applied to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he had to take high school-level classes in the evening, along with his freshman level courses, to get him up to the academic level of his peers. In spite of this challenging beginning, he graduated first in his class in 1920 and was a member Phi Beta Kappa, a liberal arts and sciences honor society. Though he was the class valedictorian, Julian was discouraged from seeking admission into a graduate school because future coworkers and employers wouldn’t like a black man having a graduate level education. Instead, he took the advice of an advisor and took a position as a chemistry teacher at Fisk University, a Black college in Nashville, Tennessee.

After two years at Fisk. Julian received the Austin Fellowship in Chemistry to attend Harvard University to finish his studies. He achieved straight A’s, finished at the top of his class, and received a Masters Degree in 1923. Even with this success, Julian was unable to obtain a position as a teaching assistant at any major universities because of the perception that White students would refuse to learn under a Black instructor. Thus, he moved on to a teaching position at West Virginia State College for Negroes, though he did not enjoy his situation in West Virginia. He eventually left West Virginia and served as an associate professor of chemistry at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

In 1929, Julian qualified for and received a Fellowship from the General Education Board and traveled to Vienna, Austria in pursuit of a Ph.D. degree. While in Vienna, Julian developed a fascination with the soybean and its interesting properties and capabilities. Focusing on organic chemistry, Julian received his Ph.D. in 1931 and returned to the United States and to Howard, as the head of the school’s chemistry department. Julian met his wife, Anna Roselle, while employed at Howard University, and the two were accused of having an affair while she was married to one of his colleagues. A scandal ensued and Julian and Anna left and moved back to DePauw, where he was appointed a teacher in organic chemistry. At DePauw, he worked on synthesizing physostigmine from the calabar bean (the seed of an African plant) to create a drug treatment for glaucoma. Julian was successful and became internationally hailed for his achievement. The Dean of the university decided to appoint Julian to the position as Chair of the chemistry department but was talked out of it because of concerns over reaction to his race.

Desiring to leave academia, Julian applied for jobs at prominent chemical companies, but was repeatedly rejected when hiring managers discovered that he was black. Ultimately, he obtained a position at the Glidden Company as chief chemist and the Director of the Soya Product Division. This was a significant development as he was the first Black scientist hired for such a position. The Glidden Company was a leading manufacturer of paint and varnish and was counting on Julian to develop compounds from soy-based products which could be used to make paints and other products. There Julian invented Aero-Foam, a product that uses soy protein to put out oil and gas fires and was widely used in World War II by the United States Navy.

On December 24, 1935, Percy married Anna and settled into their life in Chicago. Percy continued his biomedical work as he next developed a way to inexpensively develop male and female hormones from soy beans. These hormones would help to prevent miscarriages in pregnant women and would be used to fight cancer and other ailments. He next set out to provide a synthetic version of cortisone, a product which greatly relieved the pain of suffered by sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis. The real cortisone was extremely expensive and only rich people could afford it. With Julian's discovery of the soy-based substitute, millions of sufferers around the world found relief at a reasonable price. In 1950, the City of Chicago named him Chicagoan of the Year for his work. Even with this honor, the white people in his community did not accept him. When he purchased a house in Oak Park, the home was set afire by an arsonist on Thanksgiving day 1950. A year later, dynamite was thrown from a passing car and exploded outside the bedroom window of his children. Despite the fact that many residents of the town relied upon his methods to relieve their pains of and provide for their safety, some still could not stand to have him as their neighbor simply because he was Black

In 1954, Julian left the Glidden Company to establish Julian Laboratories which specialized in producing his synthetic cortisone. When he discovered that wild yams in Mexico were even more effective than Soya beans for some of his products, he opened the Laboratorios Julian de Mexico in Mexico City, Mexico which cultivated the yams and shipped them to Oak Park for refinement. In 1961, he sold the Oak Park plant to Smith, Kline and French, a giant pharmaceutical company, for 2.3 million dollars, becoming one of the first black millionaires. He then found Julian Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that he ran for the rest of his life.

Julian spent years struggling for respect in his field. He was finally recognized when he became the first black chemist elected to the National Academy of the Sciences, in 1973. He also received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. Percy Julian died of liver cancer in 1975. Since his death, he received countless awards. In 1990, he was elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame and in 1999 his synthesis of physostigmine was recognized by the American Chemical Society as “one of the top 25 achievements in the history of American chemistry.” Percy Julian is known worldwide as a trailblazer, both in the world of chemistry and as an advocate for the plight of Black scientists.