Percy Julian

Percy Lavon Julian was born on April 11, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama, the eldest of six children of James Sumner Julian, a railway mail clerk, and Elizabeth Lena Adams, a schoolteacher. His paternal grandfather had been enslaved, and the family's rise into Montgomery's small Black professional class rested on an intense faith in education. All six Julian children would eventually earn advanced degrees, a remarkable record for any American family of that era ^[1].

Alabama offered almost no public schooling for Black students beyond the eighth grade, so Julian attended a private normal school for African Americans in Montgomery. The preparation was thin. When he arrived at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1916, he was admitted as a sub-freshman, required to take remedial high school courses alongside a full college load. He also had to support himself, waiting tables and firing furnaces in a fraternity house where he was not permitted to live as a member ^[2].

Despite these handicaps, Julian graduated in 1920 as valedictorian of his class and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. The obvious next step for a top chemistry graduate was doctoral study, but his professors could not persuade any major graduate program to accept a Black student with funding. Instead, Julian took a teaching post at Fisk University in Nashville, one of the historically Black institutions that absorbed so much African American scientific talent in those decades ^[1].

In 1922 Julian won an Austin Fellowship to Harvard University, where he completed a master's degree in chemistry the following year. Harvard then declined to give him the teaching assistantship normally awarded to doctoral candidates, on the grounds that white students from the South might object to a Black instructor. Blocked again, he taught at West Virginia State College and then at Howard University in Washington, where he headed the chemistry department and oversaw construction of a new laboratory building ^[2].

The doctorate finally came from abroad. In 1929, supported by a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, Julian traveled to the University of Vienna to work under Ernst Spath, an authority on plant alkaloids. Vienna gave him more than technical training in natural product chemistry: for the first time he lived and worked in a scientific community that treated him simply as a colleague. He received his Ph.D. in 1931, one of the very few African Americans to hold a doctorate in chemistry at that time ^[3].

Julian returned to Howard briefly, then moved back to DePauw as a research fellow, bringing with him the Austrian chemist Josef Pikl. In 1935 the two announced the first total synthesis of physostigmine, the active compound of the Calabar bean used to treat glaucoma. Their result contradicted work published by Robert Robinson's celebrated group at Oxford, and Julian's structure proved correct. The synthesis, completed in a modest Indiana teaching laboratory, made his reputation among organic chemists worldwide, and the American Chemical Society later designated it a National Historic Chemical Landmark ^[4]. DePauw nonetheless declined to appoint him to its faculty, and an offer from the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin, collapsed because the town enforced an ordinance against Black residents staying overnight ^[1].

In 1936 the Glidden Company of Chicago hired Julian as director of research for its Soya Products Division, making him one of the first African Americans to lead a major industrial laboratory. At Glidden he became the leading figure in soybean chemistry. He designed a plant for isolating soy protein on an industrial scale, and the protein found uses in paper coating, paints, and textile sizing. One derivative, a foam concentrate the Navy called Aero-Foam, smothered oil and gasoline fires aboard ships during the Second World War and was credited with saving many sailors' lives ^[3].

His most consequential work concerned steroid hormones. Progesterone, testosterone, and related compounds could be obtained in the 1930s only in tiny quantities from animal sources, at prices that put them beyond most patients. Julian worked out practical routes from stigmasterol and other sterols in soybean oil, and by 1940 Glidden was producing progesterone in bulk. When the anti-inflammatory power of cortisone was announced in 1949, the hormone cost hundreds of dollars per gram. Julian devised an efficient synthesis of Reichstein's Substance S, a close cortisone precursor obtainable from soy sterols, which helped drive the price of cortisone-related drugs down dramatically ^[5].

Over his career Julian held more than 100 patents covering syntheses, processes, and products. In 1954, after Glidden retreated from steroid work, he founded Julian Laboratories in Franklin Park, Illinois, with a companion facility in Mexico that processed diosgenin from wild Mexican yams. The firm competed successfully against far larger pharmaceutical houses on the price of synthetic steroid intermediates. In 1961 he sold the company to Smith Kline and French for more than 2.3 million dollars, becoming one of the wealthiest Black businessmen in the United States, and then established the nonprofit Julian Research Institute to continue his scientific work ^[6].

On Christmas Eve of 1935 Julian married Anna Roselle Johnson, a sociologist who had earned her own doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. The couple had two children, Percy Lavon Julian Jr., who became a prominent civil rights lawyer in Wisconsin, and Faith Roselle Julian ^[2].

In 1950 the family bought a house in Oak Park, a prosperous and then almost entirely white suburb west of Chicago. Before they had fully moved in, the house was attacked with fire, and in 1951 dynamite was thrown at it. Julian hired guards and at times sat watch himself, and many Oak Park residents rallied publicly to the family's defense. The episodes became a widely reported symbol of Northern housing discrimination, and the Julians remained in Oak Park for the rest of their lives ^[7].

Julian carried his experience of exclusion into public advocacy. He spoke frequently about the barriers facing Black scientists, helped fund legal challenges to discrimination, and served on the boards of universities and civic organizations. In 1947 the NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor, and Chicago civic groups had already named him Chicagoan of the Year in 1950 ^[1].

After selling Julian Laboratories, Julian continued research at his institute in Franklin Park and worked as a consultant to Smith Kline and French and other firms. He remained active in scientific societies and accumulated a long list of honorary degrees, eventually more than a dozen, from institutions including DePauw, which had once refused him a professorship ^[3].

Recognition from the scientific establishment arrived late but decisively. In 1973 Julian was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the first Black chemist and only the second African American scientist to be so honored. He treated the election less as a personal triumph than as a marker of how long the door had stayed shut ^[6].

Julian was diagnosed with liver cancer in 1974 but kept working. He died on April 19, 1975, at a hospital in Waukegan, Illinois, eight days after his seventy-sixth birthday. Obituaries in the national press recorded both the science and the struggle, noting that his synthetic routes had changed the economics of hormone therapy ^[8].

Anyone asking who was Percy Julian encounters two intertwined stories: a chemist of the first rank, and a man who had to build his career around a wall of racial exclusion. His syntheses of physostigmine and of steroid intermediates from plant sterols are still cited among the landmark achievements of twentieth century organic chemistry, and the low-cost production methods he pioneered fed directly into the later mass manufacture of corticosteroids and hormone drugs ^[4].

Honors multiplied after his death. In 1990 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, among the first African Americans admitted. The United States Postal Service issued a Percy Julian stamp in its Black Heritage series in 1993. Schools, laboratories, and a research fellowship of the American Chemical Society carry his name, and in 2007 the PBS series NOVA devoted a two-hour documentary, Forgotten Genius, to his life, based on extensive interviews and archival research ^[7].

For students tracing Percy Julian facts today, the essentials of any Percy Julian biography are quickly told: a boy barred from high school in Alabama became one of the most productive industrial chemists of his century. Yet the list of Percy Julian achievements matters less than what they demonstrated. He proved, patent by patent, that the exclusion of Black Americans from science was a loss the country inflicted on itself ^[1].