FHPP winning essay | From Wright Field to MIT: The lessons and legacy of Carolyn Beatrice Parker

In recent years, historians have uncovered and shared the stories of many African American women in science who were previously less well-known. These scientists are often dubbed “hidden figures,” a nod to Margot Lee Shetterly’s book on the Black women who worked as NASA computers during the space race.

However, in 1950, the physicist Carolyn Beatrice Parker was far from hidden. She was listed in Who’s Who in Colored America, a catalog of biographical information on “notable” Black professionals. Although she was a professor, she died before she could complete her Ph.D.

But Parker’s story is more complicated. She is believed to be the first African American woman who earned a postdoctoral degree in physics, and her work advanced military technology and our understanding of particle physics. Today, the details of her life — alongside those of other pioneering Black women in the field, like Willie Hobbs Moore and Shirley Ann Jackson — are important to learn and share.

Early life

Parker grew up in Gainesville, Florida, in a family of professionals. Her father was a physician and pharmacist, and she and nearly all her siblings earned master’s degrees, mostly in mathematics or science. Her cousin Joan Murrell Owens, a marine biologist, once said, “My generation of family and friends was indoctrinated early [with the idea] that education was the only path to ‘freedom.’”

She received her bachelor’s degree in physics in 1938 from Fisk University, a historically Black institution. Elmer Imes, chair of Fisk’s physics department and the second African American man to obtain a physics Ph.D., advised her to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan, his alma mater. During the school year, she worked as a teacher at public schools in Florida, and during the summer, she attended classes in Michigan. When she received her master’s degree in 1941, she likely became the first African American woman to receive a postgraduate degree in physics.

Career

After graduating, Parker taught for two years at a high school in Virginia and a college in West Virginia. Then, at the height of World War II in 1943, Parker joined the Aircraft Radio Laboratory at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio (now the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). She was the only Black woman and one of two women in the Engineering Division. Parker enjoyed working with aircraft; in a newspaper article, the author wrote Parker was “soon to have her wish” of going on a test ride in one of the planes she modified.

In her role, she tested the impedance, or resistance to alternating current, of radio antennae at different frequencies to efficiently match them to radio sets for aircraft. In a now-declassified report from February 1944, Parker and an engineering colleague detailed a new method for measuring the attenuation, or gradual signal loss, of short lengths of coaxial cable, used to carry radio frequencies between aircraft radio components. Articles from the time mentioned her work with B-17 bomber planes and C-54 transport planes, which were pivotal in the war.

Parker may have worked on the atomic bomb effort, too. Between November 1943 and February 1944, Wright Field was home to a secretive Manhattan Project operation called Project Silverplate, which aimed to equip B-29 aircraft to carry atomic bombs. Also in 1943, the Manhattan Project launched the Dayton Project, which aimed to produce a highly radioactive chemical element called polonium, used as a trigger for the bombs. Many details are still classified, so Parker’s connection to the Manhattan Project is not clear.

After her work in Dayton, Parker was offered an assistant professorship at Fisk University, where she began teaching in 1947. James Raymond Lawson — a fellow mentee of Elmer Imes who had recently become the chair of the physics department after Imes’ death — recruited faculty, including Parker, to create a robust research program in infrared spectroscopy, studying the properties of radiation at a frequency below that of visible light.

After four years at Fisk, she decided to pursue another degree and was admitted as a doctoral student at MIT, although she switched to a master’s degree in her first year. In summer 1952, she also worked as a research physicist at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During her time there, she sent science toys home to younger relatives to spark their own curiosity.

She earned her second master’s degree in physics in 1953. Her thesis — “Range distribution of 122 MeV π+ and π- mesons in brass” — focused on π mesons, or pions, part of a class of subatomic particles responsible for the strong force that binds protons and neutrons. Her work was cutting-edge: π mesons were discovered just six years before she completed her thesis. In the experiment Parker analyzed, emulsions in brass plates were exposed to a pion beam to determine the range of sizes for positive and negative pions. Parker calculated the range of sizes for both sets of pions and their nuclear cross sections, the probability that they would interact with other particles.

Parker continued her studies until January 1955, with a gap from January to September 1954. Around then, she began experiencing symptoms of leukemia, which eventually became severe enough that she returned home to Florida. Parker died in 1966, at the age of 48, before she could complete her doctorate.

Other pioneers

Six years after Parker’s death, Willie Hobbs Moore became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics. Unlike Parker, Hobbs Moore was a first-generation college student. She and her sisters, she recalled, were “raised with the expectation that they would always do their best.”

She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1958 and 1961, respectively, becoming the first Black woman at the school to do either. After several industry jobs, she returned to the University of Michigan to pursue a doctoral degree, which she earned in 1972. She worked as a research scientist at the school for five years, then as an engineer and eventually executive for the Ford Motor Company. Her mantra was, “You’ve got to be excellent,” and she was involved in community service, mentorship, and STEM tutoring until her death in 1994 (sadly, also from cancer).

The second Black woman to receive a physics Ph.D. was also the first to receive one in any field from MIT: Shirley Ann Jackson. As a child, Jackson studied everything she could, from bumblebees to mathematics. Valedictorian of her high school, she attended MIT on a scholarship and earned her bachelor’s degree in physics in 1968.

Despite the racism she faced, Jackson returned to MIT for her doctoral degree, partly because she wanted to make a difference after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and partly because she “wasn’t going to give people the satisfaction of getting [her] to walk away.” She co-founded the Black Student Union at MIT, which drafted proposals for school administrators to recruit more minority students and better support them on campus — efforts that led to the Interphase program, which still exists today. After completing her Ph.D. in 1973, Jackson worked at multiple laboratories, chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and served as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before retiring in 2022.

The role of mentorship

Mentorship was important in the lives of all three scientists. Parker received guidance from Elmer Imes as an undergraduate, and although not many details on her teaching survive, she was also a mentor to her students. Hobbs Moore worked with physicist Samuel Krimm during her doctoral program, studying polymers in an unfamiliar subfield, and was herself a mentor to many.

Not all mentors were intentional. In an interview, Jackson discussed the value of “unwitting mentors,” individuals who never deliberately guided her but from whom she gained experience, “by studying them and how they did what they did and learning from them as much as [she] could.”

Today, African American women remain underrepresented in physics. In 2022, 50 years after Willie Hobbs Moore received her Ph.D., about 0.4% of doctorate recipients in the physical sciences were African American women, according to National Science Foundation survey data — 26 out of 5,428.

Perhaps mentors are as important now as they were when these three women — all determined physicists, innovators, and leaders — were building not only their careers, but a path for Black women in physics, academia, and beyond. “It was not enough for me to succeed alone,” Jackson once said. “I needed to try to help somebody else along the way.”