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.
