Chapter 1Montgomery

Foreword

I begin every book the same way. I look for the missing signature — the place on a paper, a patent, a wall label where a woman's name should be and a man's is instead. For twenty years that search has been my method and my argument both: find the name that was lifted off the work, and set it back down where it belongs. It is close, patient labor, and it has a shape I have learned to trust.

Percy Julian did not fit the shape. I went looking, out of habit, for the erased signature, and there was none to find. His name is on the hundred patents. It is on the papers, in the journals, in the record of the physostigmine synthesis that graduate students were still being taught decades after his death. Nobody lifted Percy Julian's name off his work. The work is his, undeniably, and the record says so plainly.

So why write him at all, I asked myself, a chemist out of Edinburgh whose subjects are women shut out of the twentieth century's laboratories and studios. The answer, when I found it, kept me in the chair long after I had meant to move on. The erasure in Julian's life had happened earlier than the kind I was used to, and more completely. The women I write about were let into the room and then denied what they did there. Percy Julian was not let into the room. DePauw would not hire the man who had been its own valedictorian. Harvard granted him a master's and then closed the door to the doctorate. University after university, firm after firm, decided in advance that a Black chemist was a contradiction they declined to employ. The credit was never stolen, because the access was never granted.

That was the thing I had not expected to learn from him. I had always told myself I wrote about a particular injustice — a woman's work signed by the man beside her. Julian showed me the machinery was the same machinery. Credit and access are controlled by whoever is already inside the room, and the reasons given at the threshold — she is only a wife, an assistant; he is Black, he is unqualified by his birth — are interchangeable furniture bolted to one fixed floor. I had been writing, all along, about the door, and had mistaken it for the desk.

I worked from the public record, as I always do: his own recollections, the memoirs and the press of the day, the plain civil documentation of a family that had a firebomb thrown through its window and stayed. I did not have to reconstruct a hidden life. I had to hold a well-documented one still long enough to be seen whole — the attic and the diploma, the paint company and the patents, the bombs and the National Academy, all in one frame. I expected a triumph, the story of the man who got through. I found the triumph. I also found the arithmetic beneath it harder than I wanted it to be: for every Julian who got through, the ones who did not, who left no papers and no stamp because the reaction was never allowed to run.

I called the book The Chemist because that is the plain word the country spent seventy-six years trying to keep beyond his reach and could not. Not the first, not the exception, not the Black chemist qualified by the adjective that was always meant to hold him at arm's length. The chemist. The undeniable noun he earned, and was made to earn twice, and holds now against anyone who would still like to modify it.

— Ailsa Rennie, Edinburgh

Chapter 1 · Montgomery

The house on a dirt road in Montgomery, Alabama, where Percy Lavon Julian was born on April 11, 1899, stood in the shadow of everything the nineteenth century had done to Black people and everything the twentieth century had not yet decided to undo. Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis had stood on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, six blocks from where the Julian family lived, and was inaugurated as president of a nation founded on the proposition that Black people were property. That was thirty-eight years before Percy's birth. The people who had cheered Davis were still alive. Their children ran the city.

The Julian family's proximity to that history was not metaphorical. Percy's grandparents had been enslaved. His paternal grandfather was the property of a white family in Alabama, had worked their fields, had lived under the legal fiction that he was not a person but a thing that could be bought and sold and beaten and bred. The grandfather's right hand had been mutilated, two fingers cut off, as punishment for learning to read. This was the family mythology that Percy Julian grew up inside: a grandfather who had lost fingers for the crime of literacy, who had been maimed for wanting to know what the marks on paper meant. The story was told and retold in the Julian household, not as a horror story but as a directive. The grandfather had wanted to read. They had cut off his fingers. And still the family read. The mutilation had not worked. The lesson Percy drew from it, the lesson his parents intended him to draw, was that education was worth whatever it cost, because the people who had tried to prevent it had considered it dangerous enough to cut off a man's fingers to stop it.

James Sumner Julian, Percy's father, was a railway mail clerk, one of the most coveted positions available to a Black man in the early twentieth-century South. The Railway Mail Service required its clerks to sort mail at speed while a train was moving, to know the routes and the stops and the city addresses with the precision of a human database. It was skilled work. It was federal work. It paid a salary that placed the Julian family in the narrow stratum of Black Montgomery that could be called middle class, though the term requires qualification: middle class for a Black family in Alabama in 1899 meant you had a house and food and shoes for your children, not that you had any of the protections or opportunities that the term implied for white Americans. James Julian read constantly. He read newspapers, books, magazines. He brought reading material home from the train and stacked it on tables and shelves. The house was full of print.

Elizabeth Lena Julian, Percy's mother, was a schoolteacher, another of the few professional occupations available to educated Black women in the Jim Crow South. She taught at a school for Black children in Montgomery, where the resources were inadequate, the buildings were deteriorating, and the curriculum was designed by a white power structure that had no interest in producing educated Black citizens. She taught anyway. She taught with the materials she had and supplemented them with the materials she created. She was, by every account that survives, a woman of formidable intelligence and unyielding expectations. Her children would be educated. This was not a hope. It was a plan.

Percy was the eldest of six children, three boys and three girls. The household operated on the assumption that every child would pursue education as far as education could be pursued, that every child would read, that every child would understand that the mutilated hand of the grandfather was not a relic but a warning about what happened when Black people stopped fighting for the right to know things. The children were raised in a house where books were sacred objects and ignorance was the enemy, where the daily humiliations of Jim Crow, the segregated streetcars, the whites-only drinking fountains, the back doors and the averted eyes and the constant, grinding reminder that the state of Alabama considered them less than human, were understood not as permanent conditions but as obstacles that education could eventually overcome.

Montgomery in 1899 was a city organized around the principle that Black people existed to serve white people and that any deviation from this arrangement was a threat to civilization. The principle was codified in law, enforced by custom, and maintained by violence. The Alabama Constitution of 1901, written two years after Percy's birth, would strip Black citizens of the vote through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses so effective that by 1903, only 2,980 Black voters remained on the rolls in a state with a Black population of nearly a million. The constitution's purpose was stated openly. John B. Knox, the president of the constitutional convention, declared in his opening address that the convention was called "to establish white supremacy in this state." He was not being metaphorical. He was describing a legislative agenda.

The world Percy Julian was born into was a world where a Black child could be brilliant, could read at three, could do arithmetic at four, could exhibit every marker of intellectual precocity, and it would not matter, because the state had decided in advance that Black brilliance was irrelevant. There were no public high schools for Black students in Alabama. The state provided elementary education, of a sort, through underfunded and overcrowded schools, but when a Black child reached the age of fourteen or fifteen, the state's educational obligation, such as it was, ended. If you wanted to continue your education, you went to a private institution, a church school, a normal school, one of the institutions that the Black community had built for itself because the state would not build them. And you paid for it yourself.

This was the architecture of Jim Crow education: not the absence of Black talent but the systematic refusal to develop it. The state of Alabama did not deny that Black children could learn. It denied that Black children should learn, or more precisely, it denied that the state had any obligation to help them do so. The result was a kind of artificial scarcity: a tiny number of educated Black professionals, teachers, doctors, ministers, lawyers, serving a community of hundreds of thousands, while the vast majority of Black Alabamians were funneled into agricultural labor and domestic service by a system designed to ensure that they had no other options.

The Julian family refused the funnel. James Julian's position on the railway gave the family economic stability. Elizabeth Julian's position in the school gave the family intellectual infrastructure. Together, they created a household where the funnel's gravitational pull, the pull toward low expectations, toward resignation, toward the acceptance of limits that had been imposed rather than chosen, was counteracted by a daily discipline of reading, studying, and believing that the limits were wrong.

Percy was a child who made adults nervous. Not because he was disruptive or disobedient, he was, by all accounts, quiet and studious, but because his intelligence was visible in a way that could not be easily contained or dismissed. He read everything. He read the books his mother brought home from school. He read the newspapers his father carried off the train. He read the Bible, not as devotion but as text, with the analytical attention of a child who was interested in how language worked. He was curious about the physical world in a way that his parents recognized as unusual: he wanted to know why things happened, not just that they happened. Why did water boil? Why did wood burn? Why did the sky change color at sunset? The questions were relentless, and they were specific, and they pointed in a direction that no one in the Julian family had traveled before.

He attended the State Normal School for Negroes in Montgomery, later Alabama State University, which was founded in 1867 by the American Missionary Association and was the closest thing to a secondary education available to a Black student in the city. The Normal School was designed to train teachers, not scientists. Its curriculum emphasized pedagogy and practical skills, not the advanced mathematics and laboratory science that a student with Percy's aptitudes would have encountered at a white high school. Percy learned what the school could teach him, and he wanted more. He wanted what the white students across town were getting: chemistry, physics, calculus, the intellectual toolkit that would allow him to pursue the questions that had been following him since childhood. The state of Alabama had decided he could not have it. The state of Alabama was wrong about what it could prevent.

The Normal School years were formative in a way that the biographical record does not fully illuminate, because the record of Black education in early twentieth-century Alabama is incomplete, by design. The institutions that served Black students were underfunded, understaffed, and largely invisible to the white power structure that controlled the state's educational apparatus. What survived was not the institutional record but the personal testimony of the students who passed through the system and emerged, somehow, with their ambitions intact. Percy Julian emerged with his ambitions not just intact but sharpened. He had seen the gap between what he was being taught and what existed to be taught, and the gap enraged him, not loudly, not performatively, but with the cold, sustained anger of a person who understood that the gap was not an accident but a policy.

The decision to apply to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, was an act of extraordinary ambition. DePauw was a small Methodist liberal arts college in a small Indiana town, not a prestigious institution by the standards of the Ivy League, but a real university with a real chemistry department and real laboratory equipment and real professors who were trained in the German tradition of organic chemistry that was, in the early twentieth century, the gold standard of the discipline. For a Black student from Alabama with a Normal School education, applying to DePauw was like applying to another planet.

Percy applied. He was accepted. He arrived in Greencastle in the fall of 1916, seventeen years old, carrying with him the Normal School's version of a high school education, which was not, by DePauw's standards, a high school education at all. He was admitted as a "sub-freshman", a category that did not officially exist but that DePauw created for students whose preparation was insufficient for college-level work. He would need to take high school courses alongside his college courses, to fill the gaps that Alabama had deliberately created, to learn in four years what white students had been taught in twelve.

He was the only Black student at DePauw. He could not live in the dormitories. He could not eat in the dining hall. He found a room in the attic of a fraternity house, where he worked as a waiter to pay for his lodging, serving food to white students who would then go to classrooms where he would outperform them. The arrangement was not unusual for Black students at white institutions in this era. It was the standard transaction: you could attend the university, but you could not be a member of it. You could learn, but you could not belong. The dining hall was for students. The attic was for the help. Percy Julian was both.

The indignity of the arrangement was compounded by its visibility. Every morning, Percy came down from the attic, put on an apron, and served breakfast to students who were his intellectual inferiors. Every afternoon, he took off the apron, went to class, and demonstrated that he was the best student in the room. The two facts, the apron and the intellect, existed simultaneously, and the white students who witnessed both could not reconcile them, because reconciliation would have required them to acknowledge that the racial hierarchy they inhabited was a lie. They did not acknowledge it. They ate their breakfast and went to class and watched a Black man from Alabama answer every question the professor asked, and they lived with the contradiction because the contradiction was the water they swam in.

Percy did not survive DePauw. He conquered it. He took every chemistry course the department offered. He took advanced mathematics. He took the courses he had missed in Alabama, the high school courses, and he took them alongside the college courses, and he excelled at all of them. His professors, particularly William Blanchard, who chaired the chemistry department, recognized what was in front of them: a student of exceptional ability, a mind that grasped organic chemistry with an intuitive fluency that most students never achieved. Blanchard became Percy's mentor, his advocate, the first white authority figure who saw Percy's talent and responded to it with support rather than obstruction. Julian would later describe Blanchard as "as staunch a friend as he knew how to be then, and certainly later my most unforgettable friend." Ray Dawson, a student and colleague, recalled Julian's showmanship: "He put on a grand show. He would come into his lectures in his white lab jacket with a flourish." But Dawson also understood the cost: "Percy Julian was not treasured at DePauw, by either student body or faculty or also by administration." And: "He was terribly disappointed that a man who was more accomplished, better educated, more cultured than 90 percent... could not be accepted."

In 1920, Percy Julian graduated from DePauw University. He was first in his class. He was Phi Beta Kappa. He was the valedictorian. He had arrived four years earlier as a sub-freshman who could not eat in the dining hall, and he left as the best student the university had produced. The graduation ceremony was a public fact: a Black man from Alabama, the grandson of enslaved people, standing at the podium and delivering the valedictory address to an audience of white Indianans who had spent four years watching him serve their breakfast.

He expected the degree to open doors. He expected that a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, first in his class, valedictorian, with the strongest recommendation letters the chemistry department could write, would be able to pursue a graduate degree in chemistry at any university in the country. He expected this because it was reasonable to expect it, because merit was supposed to matter, because the degree was supposed to mean something, because he had done everything the system asked him to do and done it better than anyone else.

The doors did not open. His professors, the same professors who had watched him excel for four years, told him the truth: no graduate program in chemistry would accept a Black student. No university would offer him a teaching position. No laboratory would hire him. The degree, the Phi Beta Kappa key, the valedictory address, the four years of academic dominance, was, in the calculus of American racism, insufficient. He was still Black. He was still the grandson of enslaved people. He was still, in the eyes of the institutions that controlled American science, unqualified by birth for the work he had proven himself capable of doing.

The message was delivered with sympathy. His professors were not cruel men. They liked Percy Julian. They respected his ability. They simply understood, as Percy was now required to understand, that the American scientific establishment did not employ Black chemists, and that no amount of academic achievement could override the policy. The doors were not closed because Percy Julian was unqualified. The doors were closed because Percy Julian was Black. The distinction was everything. The distinction was nothing. The doors were closed either way.

Montgomery had taught him that the world was organized against him. DePauw had taught him that excellence was possible within that organization. The space between those two lessons, the space where ambition meets obstruction and must decide whether to surrender or to find another route, was the space Percy Julian would occupy for the rest of his life. He was twenty-one years old. He had the best chemistry degree in his graduating class. He had nowhere to go.

He went to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was offered a position teaching chemistry. Fisk was one of the premier historically Black colleges in the country, a place where a young Black chemist could teach and research and build a reputation within the parallel universe of Black academia that existed because the main universe would not have him. It was a beginning. It was not the beginning he had wanted. But it was what was available, and Percy Julian had learned, in Montgomery and at DePauw, that you did not wait for the world to offer you what you deserved. You took what was available and you made it into something the world had not anticipated.

He took the job. He taught. He researched. He planned. And he kept his eye on the doors that had been closed to him, because he understood, with the clarity of a man whose grandfather had lost fingers for learning to read, that closed doors were not permanent features of the architecture. They were decisions made by people. And decisions made by people could be changed.

The context of Percy Julian's birth year, 1899, contains a specific irony that the biography cannot leave unexamined. Eighteen ninety-nine was the year Plessy v. Ferguson was three years old. The Supreme Court's 1896 ruling, which declared "separate but equal" accommodations constitutional, had provided the legal foundation for the entire architecture of Jim Crow. The ruling cited Justice Henry Brown's majority opinion that "the enforced separation of the races" did not stamp "the colored race with a badge of inferiority." The logic was perverse: if Black people felt degraded by segregation, the Court reasoned, the feeling was their own construction, not the law's intent. The white Supreme Court had decided what Black people were allowed to feel about their condition.

Montgomery in 1899 was a city of approximately 30,000 people, roughly half Black. It was the economic and political capital of the Alabama Black Belt, the rich agricultural territory that had been worked by enslaved people for generations before the Civil War and that was now worked by sharecroppers and tenant farmers bound to the land by debt peonage that replicated, in economic if not legal terms, the structure of slavery. The cotton economy that had made Montgomery's white families wealthy persisted, constrained now by labor costs rather than the absence of them, dependent still on Black labor that was systematically underpaid and legally unprotected.

James Sumner Julian, Percy's father, occupied a position in this economy that was unusual and precarious. The Railway Mail Service, established by Congress in 1864, was one of the few federal agencies that employed Black Americans in skilled, non-menial positions. The work was demanding: railway mail clerks sorted letters and packages while trains were in motion, memorizing thousands of city addresses and routes, meeting a federal standard that required sorting at a minimum speed with a minimum error rate. Those who passed the examination earned wages that were federally guaranteed, beyond the reach of local employers who preferred to pay Black workers as little as the market would bear. James Julian had passed the examination. He held a federal job. He was, in the terminology of early twentieth-century Black Alabama, a "steady man," a man with income that could not be easily taken away.

Elizabeth Lena Adams Julian, Percy's mother, taught at a school for Black children funded by a combination of state appropriation and community contribution. The state's allocation for Black schools in Alabama in 1900 was approximately $1.31 per pupil, compared to $3.28 per pupil for white schools, a disparity that forced Black communities to supplement public funding with private contributions just to maintain minimal operations. Elizabeth Julian taught in these conditions. She taught algebra and reading and history to children who came to school hungry and left to work in the fields. She taught because she believed in the power of the thing she was teaching, and she taught Percy at home, supplementing what the school could provide with what she could provide on her own.

Percy had five siblings: Irma, James Jr., Emerson, Mattie, and Elizabeth. James Julian's railway salary supported all of them. The household's material circumstances were, by the standards of Black Montgomery in 1900, comfortable. There were books. There were meals. There were shoes. These were not small things in a community where barefoot children and hunger were common. The Julian children were not wealthy. They were not poor in the way that most of the Black children around them were poor. They inhabited the narrow band between the two conditions that their father's federal salary had carved out for them, and they were expected, by both parents, to use that band as a launching pad rather than a destination.