Percy Lavon Julian - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Percy Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama as the first child of six born to James Sumner Julian and Elizabeth Lena (Adams) Julian. James, like his wife, a graduate of what was to be Alabama State University was employed as a clerk in the Railway Service of the United States Post Office, and his father was a slave. Elizabeth worked as a school teacher. Percy Julian grew up in the time of Jim Crow. Among his childhood memories was finding a lynched man hung from a tree while walking in the woods near his home. While it was generally unheard of for African Americans at the time to pursue an education beyond the 8th grade, Julian's parents steered all of their children toward higher education.

Julian attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. The college accepted few African-American students. The segregated nature of the town forced social humiliations. Julian was not allowed to live in the college dormitories and first stayed in an off-campus boarding home, which refused to serve him meals. It took him days before Julian found an establishment where he could eat. He worked firing the furnace, as a waiter, and doing other odd jobs in a fraternity house. In return, he was allowed to sleep in the attic and eat at the house. Julian graduated from DePauw in 1920 Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian. By 1930 Julian's father had moved the entire family to Greencastle, Indiana so that all his children could attend college at DePauw. The father was still working as a railroad postal clerk.

Julian wanted to obtain his doctorate in chemistry, but learned it would be difficult for an African American. After graduating from DePauw, Julian became a chemistry instructor at Fisk University. He then received an Austin Fellowship in Chemistry and went to Harvard University in 1923 for his M.S. Worried that white students would resent being taught by an African American, Harvard withdrew Julian's teaching assistantship. He was unable to complete his PhD at Harvard.

In 1929, while an instructor at Howard University, Julian received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue his graduate work at the University of Vienna, where he earned his PhD in 1931. He studied under Ernst Späth and was considered an impressive student. In Europe, he found freedom from the racial prejudices that had nearly stifled him in the States. He freely participated in intellectual social gatherings, went to the opera and found greater acceptance among his peers. Julian was one of the first African Americans to receive a PhD in chemistry, after St. Elmo Brady and Edward M. A. Chandler. During Julian's lifetime he earned more than 138 chemical patents for his work. Percy Julian was the second African American to get a masters degree in chemistry. He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and the second African-American scientist inducted from any field.

After returning from Vienna, Julian taught at Howard University for one year, where he met his future wife, Anna Roselle Johnson (PhD in Sociology, 1937, University of Pennsylvania). They married on December 24, 1935 and had two children: Percy Lavon Julian, Jr. (August 31, 1940 – February 24, 2008), who became a prestigious civil rights lawyer in Madison, Wisconsin; and Faith Roselle Julian (1944– ), who still resides in their Oak Park home and often makes moving speeches about her father and his contributions to science.

At Howard, Julian got involved in university politics and set off an embarrassing chain of events. After he goaded, at the University President's request, a white chemist named Jacob Shohan into resigning, Shohan retaliated by releasing to the local African-American newspaper the letters Julian had written to him from Vienna. The letters contained accounts of Julian's sex life, and criticism of individual Howard faculty members. Julian's laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson, also charged he had found his wife and Julian together in a sexual tryst. When Thompson was fired for filing a lawsuit against the University, he also gave the paper racy letters which Julian had written to him from Vienna. Through the summer of 1932, the Baltimore Afro-American published all of Julian's letters. Eventually, the scandal, and its accompanying pressure, forced Julian to resign. He lost his position, and everything he had worked for.

After the scandal, Julian's mentor, William Blanchard, threw him a much-needed lifeline at the lowest point in Julian's career. Blanchard offered Julian a position to teach organic chemistry at DePauw University in 1932. Julian helped Josef Pikl, a fellow student at the University of Vienna, to come to the United States to work with him at DePauw. In 1935 Julian and Pikl completed the total synthesis of physostigmine, and confirmed the structural formula assigned to it. Robert Robinson of Oxford University was the first to publish a synthesis of physostigmine, but Julian noticed that the melting point was wrong for Robinson's end product. When Julian completed his synthesis, the melting point matched the correct one for natural physostigmine from the calabar bean.

Julian also extracted stigmasterol, which took its name from Physostigma venenosum, the west African calabar bean that he hoped could serve as raw material for synthesis of human steroidal hormones. At about this time, 1934, Butenandt, and Fernholz, in Germany, had shown that stigmasterol, isolated from soybean oil, could be converted to progesterone by synthetic organic chemistry..