During the height of World War II between 1942 and 1945, the US government’s top-secret atomic bomb construction program, codenamed the Manhattan Project, employed a total of around 600,000 people, including scientists, technicians, janitors, engineers, chemists, and maids and day laborers. Although rarely recognized, African American men and women were among them – their ranks were strengthened by greater employment opportunities during the war and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 Executive Order 8802 that outlawed racial discrimination in the defense industry.
At the project’s rural manufacturing facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington, black workers have been relegated to mostly minor jobs such as janitors, cooks, and laborers regardless of their education or experience. At the project’s urban research centers – the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory and Columbia University in New York – several black scientists were able to play key roles in the development of the two atomic bombs that were fired on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, effectively ending the war. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, at least 12 black chemists and physicists participated in the primary research in the metallurgical laboratory, a small fraction of the more than 400 scientists, technicians, and laboratory workers tasked with developing a method to produce plutonium called a nuclear reaction.
Chemist Benjamin Scott, who worked at the Chicago Met Lab, described the atomic bomb project to the Chicago Daily Tribune as “a successful experiment in physics but also in sociology” and that “white people employed on the project insisted to uphold the project spirit of fair play. “
Arthur Compton, the Manhattan project leader in Chicago and Nobel Prize winner in physics, said the project was unique in bringing “colored and white, Christian and Jewish” together for a common cause. Beyond Compton’s laboratory and Columbia University site, opportunities for black scientists on the project were often limited by racism.
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Decent pay, separate facilities
Coal workers at the Oak Ridge Coal Yard, Tennessee, 1945. The town of Oak Ridge was built on isolated farmland in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Galerie Bilderwelt / Getty Images
The rural Oak Ridge community was in the deep south, where Jim Crow’s segregation was in full force during the war as the Manhattan Project’s manufacturing facility grew. Black workers, attracted to the high-paying and vacant housing advertised on the site, occupied a minor role at the Tennessee site, only to be housed in shacks in groups of five or six, sixteen-by-sixteen-foot plywood structures with shutters, a stove and no plumbing. Women were separated from men even when they were married. “There are few other areas in the south where the plight of the Negros is as dire as this compared to that of their white neighbors,” said Enoc Waters, columnist for the Chicago Defender.
Black workers faced similar discrimination at the Hanford, Washington site, where the plutonium was made to build the first atomic bomb. They lived in inferior living conditions and were not served in many shops and restaurants. Lula Mae Little, who moved with thousands of other African Americans from the Midwest and South to the desert of eastern Washington in search of better wages, referred to Hanford as the “Mississippi of the North.”
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J. Ernest Wilkins and other black scientists
J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago as a 19 year old in 1942, c. 2007.
Dan Dry / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
In 1944, a 21-year-old African American mathematician named Ernest Wilkins joined the Metallurgical Laboratory team. Wilkins, a child prodigy who entered the University of Chicago at the age of 13, earned his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. Graduate in six years – at that time one in half of 1 percent of black men in America with a Ph.D. However, after graduation, he received no job offers from major research institutions and taught at several historically black colleges before being hired for the Manhattan Project.
In the metallurgical laboratory, Wilkins researched neutron energy, reactor physics and technology with two European-born scientists, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard. Together they did pioneering work in the movement of subatomic particles. When his team was relocated to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1944, a location on the Manhattan Project where the X-10 graphite reactor was built, Wilkins was left behind because he was black. Edward Teller, a scientist at the Columbia University complex, wrote to the War Research Department to try to get him to work in New York. “He is a colored man and since Wigner’s group is moving to (Oak Ridge), he is unable to continue working with this group. I think it might be a good idea to secure his services for our work,” said Teller . He didn’t go to New York.
Black scientists at Metallurgical Lab and Columbia University included: Edwin R. Russell, a research chemist who focused on the isolation and extraction of plutonium-239 from uranium; Moddie Taylor, a chemist who analyzed the chemical properties of rare earth metals; Ralph Gardner-Chavis, a chemist who, along with Wilkins, worked closely with Enrico Fermi; George Warren Reed, who studied uranium and thorium fission yields; Lloyd Quarterman, a chemist who worked on atomic fission; the Harvard-trained brothers Lawrence and William Knox, chemists who studied the effects of the bomb and the separation of the uranium isotope, respectively; Chemists Harold Delaney and Benjamin Scott and physicists Jasper Jeffries.
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Advocate peaceful use of the atomic bomb
The Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois was the first laboratory set up to study pure plutonium. Photo taken in 1942.
The National Archives
Wilkins and Jeffries were two of 70 scientists from the Manhattan Project who signed a petition calling on President Harry S. Truman not to use the atomic bomb on Japan without first demonstrating their power and giving Japan the opportunity to shut down surrender. But Truman never saw the petition, which only became known about when it was approved in 1961.
At the Met Lab, Wilkins and Jeffries joined the Chicago atomic scientists, founded in 1945, to discuss the moral and social responsibility of scientists with regard to the use of the atomic bomb. In 1947 Jeffries gave a speech to the American Veterans Committee, urging the peaceful use of the atomic bomb. “The best way to ensure peaceful uses of nuclear energy is to ban war,” he said. Jeffries argued that the presence of the atomic bomb necessitated a strong world government and United Nations that would help mitigate the development of nuclear weapons in many countries.
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A commitment to science teaching
J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. was honored by the University of Chicago at a special event on March 2, 2007.
Dan Dry / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0
After World War II, Wilkins worked for the United Nuclear Corporation as a mathematician for a decade. He later took on prestigious professorships at two historically black colleges, Howard University and Clark Atlanta University, where he retired in 2003. From 1974 to 1975 he was President of the American Nuclear Society. Many of his black colleagues, including Jeffries, spent years after World War II at black colleges, feeding generations of black scientists. Simultaneously with the passage of the National Defense Education Act, which funded science education for all Americans, Wilkins worked with the National Urban League in 1958 to create a program for African American scholars.
By the time he died in 2011 at the age of 87, Wilkins had written more than 100 papers. According to Shane Landrum, a historian of black nuclear scientists, the work of Wilkins and other scientists in the Black Manhattan Project, along with their white and immigrant colleagues, changed “the course of the war and the role of science in American politics.”
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