Hidden Figures of the Manhattan Project: The African American Scientists Who Helped Build the Atomic Age

Long Overlooked, Black Scientists and Technicians Played Critical Roles in America’s Most Secretive Wartime Mission

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a crash program in October 1941 to develop an atomic bomb, he set in motion the most ambitious scientific mobilization in U.S. history. The effort—later known as the Manhattan Project—would ultimately change global geopolitics, end World War II, and usher in the nuclear age.

Yet buried within the classified corridors of laboratories at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Los Alamos Laboratory was a small but extraordinary group of African American scientists and technicians whose contributions have remained largely absent from mainstream history.

A Scientific Undertaking Under Segregation

Between 1941 and 1946, roughly 130,000 Americans worked on the Manhattan Project at sites including Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Most African Americans were assigned construction or plant operations roles in segregated facilities.

But a handful broke through barriers of Jim Crow segregation and limited educational access to serve as chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and research technicians in America’s most sensitive scientific mission.

At a time when only 18% of Southern Black students attended high school in 1933, their presence in advanced laboratories was remarkable.

The Scientists: Ph.D.s in the Atomic Age

Among the most distinguished was mathematical prodigy J. Ernest Wilkins, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago at just 19 years old.

Chemist William Jacob Knox (MIT) and biologist Lawrence Howland Knox (Harvard) were part of an accomplished Massachusetts family that produced three Ph.D. scholars before World War II.

Other scientists included Samuel Proctor Massie, Moddie Daniel Taylor, and Wilkins—men whose academic achievements rivaled those of their more widely recognized white contemporaries.

While figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi became household names, the Black scientists who labored alongside them were chronicled primarily in African American newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier.

The Technicians: Essential, Yet Often Uncredited

Beyond the Ph.D. scientists, African American technicians provided indispensable expertise.

Chemist Lloyd Albert Quarterman worked alongside Fermi at Chicago and collaborated with Albert Einstein> at Columbia University.

Mass spectroscopist Robert Johnson Omohundro analyzed atomic particles critical to bomb development. Others—Harold Delaney, Ralph Gardner-Chavis, Jasper Brown Jeffries, George Warren Reed Jr., Edwin Roberts Russell, Benjamin Franklin Scott, and Sherman Carter—would later complete doctoral degrees or assume prominent academic and industrial roles.

Their wartime experience provided training, professional networks, and credentials that propelled postwar careers in academia, private industry, and federal service.

After the Bomb

Following Japan’s surrender after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, these scientists dispersed into academic and governmental institutions.

Massie later became president of North Carolina Central College and, in 1966, the first African American faculty member at the U.S. Naval Academy, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Others returned to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), mentoring a new generation of scientists during the Cold War and Civil Rights eras.

A Legacy Recovered

The contributions of African American scientists and technicians to the Manhattan Project have only recently begun to receive broader recognition. Their stories complicate the narrative of wartime science—highlighting both the extraordinary achievements of Black intellectuals and the structural inequalities they overcame.

As modern policymakers push for expanded diversity in STEM fields, these pioneers stand as powerful evidence that Black excellence in science is not new—it is foundational to America’s technological ascent.

🖤✊🏾 Black History Series content sponsored by Ford Motor Company.

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-- By James W. Thomas, Jasmine Thomas, John James, Jessica Perry, and Michael Thomas

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