You know the story of the brilliant chemist Percy Julian, right? The Alabama-born grandson of a man who’d had fingers amputated as punishment for learning to read and write while enslaved, his discoveries led to everything from water-based paint and a treatment for glaucoma, to firefighting foam that saved numerous lives in World War II. If you’ve used a birth control pill for family planning, you’ve benefited from his work. There’s a high school named for him in Chicago, and a middle school in Oak Park, so his remarkable life should be familiar, but on the chance that it’s not—as it wasn’t for me or most folks I asked—PBS is offering a free stream of Forgotten Genius, its 2007 Nova documentary about Julian, through the month of February. It’s directed by Llewellyn M. Smith and stars Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Julian, using a dramatized framework that has Julian recounting his own life.
No career positions in academia were awaiting, however. In 1935, while working as mere lab instructors and research fellows at DePauw, Julian and Pikl became famous in their field. They solved a high-profile problem: how to make a synthetic and affordable version of a prohibitively expensive natural chemical (physostigmine) used to treat glaucoma. Their published paper, with Julian as lead author, refuted the work of an internationally known and respected chemist, setting off an academic furor.
The attacks only strengthened the family’s resolve to stay. (To leave, Julian wrote later, “would have been cowardly and wrong.”) And their daughter, Faith Julian, still lives there. She told me last week that she thinks her father, who had more than 100 patents and, in 1973, became the second African American and first chemist elected to the National Academy of Sciences, might have also been a Nobel laureate if it weren’t for the racism of the time. “I think the things he did were so noteworthy, he really deserved [it],” she said, “but that was going to be an impossibility, for a Black man in that day. Had his skin been white it would have been a whole different story for him. He would have received all the accolades he deserved, and the roadblocks wouldn’t have been there. All the obstacles that he met along the way, all the racism—that would have been nonexistent.”
