Percy Julian

Percy Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899. His grandfather had been enslaved and had two fingers cut off as punishment for learning to write. There was no high school for Black students in Montgomery, so he entered DePauw University in Indiana as a "sub-freshman", catching up on years of missed schooling while waiting tables and living in the attic of a fraternity house. He graduated first in his class in 1920.

He did a master's at Harvard, which then withdrew his teaching post for fear white students would object. After years of teaching at Black colleges he went to Vienna and took his doctorate in 1931. Back at DePauw he pulled off the first synthesis of physostigmine, a drug for glaucoma, beating a leading Oxford chemist who had made an error. The university declined to make him a professor.

He went into industry, becoming director of research at the Glidden paint company in Chicago in 1936, and turned the soybean into a chemical factory. He found ways to make sex hormones cheaply from soy sterols and, in 1949, a route to synthetic cortisone, which brought a drug for rheumatoid arthritis within reach of ordinary patients. A soy-based foam he developed was used to smother fires on ships in the war.

In 1950 he bought a house in Oak Park, a white suburb. It was firebombed before the family moved in and attacked with dynamite the following year. He stayed. He founded his own company, sold it for millions, and in 1973 became the second Black scientist elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He died in 1975.