Black and African American Physicists Research Guide: Books

Essential scientific contributions from African Americans go back as far as colonial times and have led to innovations in everything from the light bulb to open-heart surgery ... Ranging across all of the scientific disciplines, this encyclopedia offers a comprehensive exploration of the impact of African American scientists throughout U.S. history--their accomplishments, the obstacles overcome, and the challenges they still face. The encyclopedia includes in-depth information about the scientific contributions of more than 100 leading African American scientists; more than 150 entries on the institutions and organizations dedicated to helping African Americans pursue their scientific careers; issue-centered entries on important topics.

Features scientists in the fields of chemistry, computer science, environmental & earth science, life sciences, physics, mathematics, and engineering. Provides some biographical information for each scientist; discussion questions related to the scientist's personal life and field of study; a science experiment related to his or her field of study. DVD toolkit and manual.

Sullivan once headed Detroit's program to infuse African American history into the public school curriculum. Here he profiles 25 black American woman who have made significant contributions to science and technology, explaining that many, many more are utterly unknown because first of legal bans on granting patents to slaves and later because of social constraints on women.

The authors of this groundbreaking book have generously offered us a front-row view of the lives of women who have entered male-dominated worlds. The stories of these women scientists tell of major accomplishments, despite the additional burdens of having to fight on two fronts: racism and sexism

Author Diann Jordan took a journey to find out what inspired and daunted black women in their desire to become scientists in America. Letting 18 prominent black women scientists talk for themselves, Sisters in Science becomes an oral history stretching across decades and disciplines and desires. From Yvonne Clark, the first black woman to be awarded a B.S. in mechanical engineering to Georgia Dunston, a microbiologist who is researching the genetic code for her race, to Shirley Jackson, whose aspiration led to the presidency of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Jordan has created a significant record of women who persevered to become firsts in many of their fields.

Taking into account the dearth of information on Black scientists, Willie Pearson conducted a study on the social background of Black scientists in 1978. This book reflects the results of that study.

Well before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against nuclear weapons, African Americans were protesting the Bomb. Historians have generally ignored African Americans when studying the anti-nuclear movement, yet they were some of the first citizens to protest Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Now for the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb tells the compelling story of those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament by connecting the nuclear issue with the fight for racial equality

As NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969, many African American leaders protested the billions of dollars used to fund "space joyrides" rather than help tackle poverty, inequality, and discrimination at home. This volume examines such tensions as well as the ways in which NASA's goal of space exploration aligned with the cause of racial equality. Essays provide new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad. NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement offers important lessons from history as today's activists grapple with the distance between social movements like Black Lives Matter and scientific ambitions such as NASA's mission to Mars.

The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty. We Could Not Fail tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of how shooting for the stars helped to overcome segregation on earth. Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights. They recount how these technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and an astronaut candidate surmounted barriers to move, in some cases literally, from the cotton fields to the launching pad. The authors vividly describe what it was like to be the sole African American in a NASA work group and how these brave and determined men also helped to transform Southern society by integrating colleges, patenting new inventions, holding elective office, and reviving and governing defunct towns. Adding new names to the roster of civil rights heroes and a new chapter to the story of space exploration, We Could Not Fail demonstrates how African Americans broke the color barrier by competing successfully at the highest level of American intellectual and technological achievement.