Beyond Banneker

Black Mathematicians and the Paths to Excellence

Erica N. Walker

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438452173
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Erica N. Walker presents a compelling story of Black mathematical excellence in the United States. Much of the research and discussion about Blacks and mathematics focuses on underachievement; by documenting in detail the experiences of Black mathematicians, this book broadens significantly the knowledge base about mathematically successful African Americans. Beyond Banneker demonstrates how mathematics success is fostered among Blacks by mathematicians, mathematics educators, teachers, parents, and others, a story that has been largely overlooked by the profession and research community. Based on archival research and in-depth interviews with thirty mathematicians, this important and timely book vividly captures important narratives about mathematics teaching and learning in multiple contexts, as well as the unique historical and contemporary settings related to race, opportunity, and excellence that Black mathematicians experience. Walker draws upon these narratives to suggest ways to capitalize on the power and potential of underserved communities to respond to the national imperative for developing math success for new generations of young people.

ONE

INTRODUCTION

Who are Black mathematicians? What are their paths to the profession? Although this book provides some answers to these questions, it is by necessity a synthesis of many stories past and present. By one estimate, there are roughly 300 living Black mathematicians in the United States. They work in colleges and universities; for federal, state, and local governments and agencies; in private and public secondary schools; and in industry. Their fields encompass pure and applied mathematics, including operations research, analysis, game theory, topology, algebra, number theory, and statistics. The mathematics they do is elegant, relevant, and practical, as well as critical, for the sciences, technology, engineering, finance, public policy, national security, and a host of other domains relevant to the well-being of the country and the world.

Black mathematicians are indeed a rarity, as are mathematicians in the United States generally. Recent American Mathematical Society data show that roughly 1,400 people were granted the PhD in a mathematical science by a U.S. university in 2008–2009, the most recent year for which data are available. Half of those individuals hailed from outside of the United States. Of the 669 American citizens who received the PhD, 86 were Black, Latino, Asian, or Native American. Nineteen, or less than 3% that year, were Black.

In the public imagination, mathematicians seem to spring fully formed as individuals whose sole interest is mathematics, who are socially inept, and who are unconcerned with any topic other than mathematics. There is a prevalent idea that mathematics is a completely solitary enterprise, done in the absence of any community. Burton (1999) describes “a false social stereotype, promoted and reinforced by the media, of the (male) mathematician, locked away in an attic room, scribbling on his [sic] whiteboard and, possibly, solving Fermat’s Last Theorem” (p. 127). These notions of mathematics and those who do it are disseminated to American school students at an early age. Substantial research in mathematics education reveals that both elementary and secondary teachers and students share limited notions of mathematics and, further, narrow ideas about who mathematicians are and the work that they do (Cirillo & Herbel-Eisenmann, 2011; Moreau, Mendick, & Epstein, 2009).

Works focusing on the formative and educational experiences of mathematicians are relatively rare. Within these works, Black mathematicians are often absent altogether or represented by one or two individuals. For example, books exploring women mathematicians (Murray, 2000) or scientists in general (Hermanowicz, 1998) do not usually include more than one or two African Americans. Books addressing Black mathematicians and their research for the most part do not focus on their personal and professional lives nor on the journeys they took to become mathematicians (Dean, 1997; Dean, McZeal, & Williams, 1999; Newell et al., 1980). Books that provide more detailed personal information and include Black mathematicians (e.g., Albers & Alexanderson, 1985; Albers, Alexanderson, & Reid, 1990; Kenschaft, 2005) do so largely in the style of encyclopedias, with brief synopses of Black mathematicians’ personal and professional lives; Kessler, Kidd, Kidd, and Morin’s (1996) profiles of 100 Black scientists include 4 mathematicians. Beyond Banneker provides detail about Black mathematicians’ early mathematical experiences and in-depth analysis of the relationships between their cultural, ethnic, and mathematical identities. In documenting, describing, and analyzing the formative, educational, and professional experiences of Black mathematicians, this book seeks to add a significant missing component to the national narrative about mathematics and mathematicians.

Throughout this book, I primarily draw on extensive interviews conducted with 35 U.S.-born Black mathematicians who earned their PhDs in a mathematical science between 1941 and 2008 and describe the richness and variety of Black mathematicians’ experiences, from Banneker and Fuller’s time to the present day. The interviews are augmented by data collected from books, texts, oral histories, articles, and essays written by and about Black mathematicians in the United States and by information gleaned from site visits to conferences, colleges, and universities.¹

I begin by telling the stories of the first Black persons in the United States to earn their PhDs in mathematics, Elbert Frank Cox and Euphemia Lofton Haynes, and of the three oldest Black mathematicians in the United States interviewed for this study, David Blackwell, Evelyn Granville, and Clarence Stephens. These mathematicians, the “Vanguard,” reveal that a host of factors contributed to their becoming mathematicians. As they were among the first Black Americans to earn their PhDs in mathematics, their stories have inspired others to pursue mathematics.

The Vanguard

When I was growing up, it [was] highly unlikely that you would know a PhD. In fact, when I got to [this job] my good [White] buddy would say, “Wayne, when I was growing up I had an uncle who was a mathematician so I kind of knew what they did and I knew that I wanted to be one. But in your case, how did you know you wanted to be one?” Now, in my case it was different: you could not see all the way to a PhD.

—Wayne Leverett, PhD, interview² (my italics)

In any category of “firsts,” there is always an underlying question of how “the first” decided that it was within his or her power to become that which no one like him or her had become before. The answers Elbert Frank Cox and Euphemia Lofton Haynes (the first Black male and female Americans to earn doctoral degrees in mathematics) might have given to this question, unfortunately, are unknown. But what we do know about them—largely through remembrances from Cox’s students, colleagues, and family members and from Lofton Haynes’s collection of family and professional papers held at Catholic University—tells us something about their journeys as mathematicians and, also, the ways in which these journeys left blueprints for others to follow.

Elbert Frank Cox, who earned his PhD in mathematics from Cornell in 1925, was born in Evansville, Indiana, in 1895. Indiana’s location in the Midwest, bordering southern states but also serving as a home for abolitionists, meant that it had attendant characteristics of both the North and the South with regard to race relations. Cox lived on a neighborhood block that was considered to be racially mixed, but in 1903, the “most serious race riot in Evansville history broke out in his neighborhood” (Donaldson & Fleming, 2000, p. 106). Yet despite growing up in a racially mixed neighborhood, Cox attended segregated schools for most of his childhood. His father, Johnson D. Cox, was a teacher at the elementary school he attended. Cox’s accomplishments are all the more impressive given that he was born and came of age during a period considered to be the nadir of American race relations—a period of curtailed and withdrawn civil rights and extensive racial violence against Blacks between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the new century (Anderson, 1988).

Cox enrolled in Indiana University in 1913 as a mathematics and physics major, earning all A’s in his mathematics courses. After graduating from there in 1917, he became a high school mathematics and physics teacher in Kentucky. He then began teaching at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1919. While teaching at Shaw, he began taking courses at Cornell University, beginning in 1920. He applied to Cornell’s doctoral program in 1921 and solicited letters of recommendation from his Indiana University professors. One professor, S. C. Davisson, wrote that he “would be glad to have him in the graduate program in Indiana: ‘he surpasses any colored man I have known as a student in mathematics’” (Donaldson & Fleming, 2000, p. 112). Another, probably Tobias Dantzig, wrote an official letter, and then wrote a second letter to Professor Tanner at Cornell because he anticipated “certain difficulties for the young man because of the fact that he is of the colored race” (Donaldson & Fleming, 2000, p. 112).

Kenschaft (1987) notes that Cox’s Cornell advisor, William Lloyd Garrison Williams, was probably aware of the significance of Cox being the first Black person in the world to earn his PhD in mathematics and suggested that he submit his dissertation abroad in addition to Cornell so his “status could not be disputed” (p. 172). Cox finished the PhD in 1925, and after a few years as a professor at West Virginia State College, he began teaching at Howard University, in 1929. At Howard, he joined Dudley Woodard (PhD 1928), the second African American to earn his PhD in mathematics (from the University of Pennsylvania), who was the department chairman. Eventually, the mathematics department at Howard could claim as faculty five of the first eight African Americans to earn their PhDs in mathematics, including William Claytor (PhD 1933, University of Pennsylvania), David Blackwell (PhD 1941, Illinois), and J. Ernest Wilkins (PhD 1942, Chicago). Although Howard did not have a PhD program in mathematics until 1975, its master’s degree program in mathematics was one of the first among historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and produced several students who eventually went on to earn their PhDs. Upon Cox’s retirement in the 1965–1966 school year, Howard’s president remarked that Cox “had directed more masters degree students than any other professor at Howard” (Donaldson & Fleming, 2000, p. 121).

Since his retirement and death (in 1969), Cox’s life and career in mathematics have been honored, most prominently with the Cox-Talbot Address by the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM), an organization founded by Black mathematicians. Whether his path crossed that of a fellow Washingtonian who “in her spare time taught at Howard University,” Euphemia Lofton Haynes, the first African American woman to earn her PhD in mathematics, is unknown.

Lofton Haynes’s accomplishment itself as the first African American woman to earn her PhD in mathematics was unknown for many years, and in fact, Marjorie Browne (PhD 1950, Michigan) and Evelyn Boyd Granville (PhD 1949, Yale) were each assumed at various periods to be the first African American women to earn their PhDs in mathematics.³ Despite the fact that some reports published around the time of Lofton Haynes’s death mention her receiving the doctorate in mathematics from Catholic University in 1943, no one in the mathematics community seems to have connected the dots until the late 1990s. Granville, born and raised in Washington, DC, herself an alumna of the same secondary school that Lofton Haynes attended, noted, “surprisingly, no one in DC ever mentioned the name of Euphemia Lofton Haynes to me and I did not hear about her until late 1999. This remains a mystery to me” (E. B. Granville, personal communication).

Born in 1890, Lofton Haynes was a contemporary of Cox, and although she lived in Washington, DC, for much of her life—the exceptions being her attendance at Smith College (bachelor’s degree in mathematics, 1914) and the University of Chicago (master’s in education, 1920)—it seems that their paths never crossed. Before leaving DC for Smith and the University of Chicago, Lofton Haynes began her education in the segregated city schools of Washington, DC, attending the highly regarded Dunbar School⁴ and graduating from it as valedictorian (Duffie, 2003).

What made Euphemia Lofton Haynes decide to pursue her doctorate in mathematics is unknown, but her commitment to education was clear. Teaching for 47 years in the DC public school system and also as a professor at Miner Teachers College in DC (now part of the University of the District of Columbia), she became a member and, eventually, president of the DC Board of Education. Widely acknowledged as a key factor in the integration of the DC schools in the 1960s and 1970s, she was a fierce opponent of tracking in schools. When she died in 1980, her status as the first Black woman to earn a PhD in mathematics was unknown, despite her leaving a substantial collection of family papers to Catholic University.

Many of the teachers at Dunbar, as Evelyn Boyd Granville attests and other chroniclers have described (Cromwell, 2006; Sowell, 1974), were highly educated and influenced their students to pursue postsecondary education. Lofton Haynes fondly remembered Miss Harriette Shadd, a teacher at Dunbar and a Smith College graduate—“I just idolized her, that’s all” (Lofton Haynes oral history). It was due to her influence that Lofton Haynes wished to attend, and eventually enrolled in, Smith. All we know of Lofton Haynes’s decision to get her PhD in mathematics is what she told an interviewer in 1972⁵:

[I] approach everything from a philosophical point of view. Does that say anything? I have been a mathematics scholar all of my life, through high school, through college, and then to get my doctor’s degree in mathematics. Now I didn’t expect to get my doctors degree, never, in mathematics but I wasn’t surprised … because I enjoyed it so much.

Three of the oldest mathematicians interviewed for this book—David Blackwell (1919–2010), Evelyn Boyd Granville (1924– ), and Clarence Stephens (1917– )—share some similarities with Cox and Lofton Haynes (including the fact that all of them have ties to the greater Washington, DC, area), although the three grew up in very different circumstances. Blackwell (arguably the most well-known) was born and educated in a predominantly White small town in Illinois; Granville was born and raised in predominantly Black Washington, DC; and Stephens was born and educated in segregated schools in rural and urban North Carolina.

Despite these different backgrounds, these three mathematicians share a common experience: they were Black and earned their PhDs in mathematics in an era when to be Black and highly educated was quite rare. David Blackwell was the seventh Black person to earn his PhD in mathematics, and he received it in 1941 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was the first African American to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in any field, and he retired in 1988 from a long career as a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Despite his growing up in Centralia, Illinois—a predominantly White town that he noted was “not North of the Mason-Dixon Line”—Blackwell felt that he “really didn’t face any obstacles to becoming a mathematician” (D. Blackwell, personal communication, October 2007). For example, although he attended a predominantly White high school with an all-White teaching staff, one of his teachers recognized his mathematical talent and encouraged him to join the mathematics club.

Blackwell did not suggest, however, that his induction into the profession was a completely color-blind one. He described this experience: after he completed his undergraduate degree, he was being considered for graduate fellowships, along with other White candidates (Agwu, Smith, & Barry, 2003). One of the fellowships involved teaching; the other, with greater funding, was a nonteaching fellowship. One of his White peers told him that he would probably get the nonteaching fellowship, saying

“Well, you’re good enough to be supported one way or another. And they’re not going to put you in front of a classroom” … and of course, he meant because I was Black. And you know, he was right? (D. Blackwell, personal communication, October 2007)

Evelyn Boyd Granville (PhD, 1949) was one of the first African American women to receive a PhD in mathematics. Born in Washington, DC, she attended segregated schools, including the aforementioned Dunbar High School, which has been renowned for its history in educating Blacks in Washington, DC, for decades (Sowell, 1974):

Dunbar gave us inspiration, quality education, and, you know, they made us feel good about ourselves. So they gave us, I can’t think of a good word, but self-something-or-other…. It was a tradition at Dunbar to encourage us to go to the Ivy League schools. And Miss Mary Cromwell [one of Granville’s mathematics teachers] was the sister of Dr. Otelia Cromwell, a graduate of Smith in 1900, somewhere around there. Otelia Cromwell went to Smith, and then later went to Yale and got her PhD in English. And Miss Mary Cromwell and Dr. Otelia’s niece [Adelaide]⁶ also went to Smith. They encouraged me to apply to Smith, but I also applied to Mount Holyoke. And I was admitted to both Smith and Mount Holyoke, but I chose Smith, I’m sure at the urging of the Cromwells. (E. B. Granville, interview, 2009)

Granville completed her doctorate in mathematics at Yale, then spent some time in New York City doing postdoctoral work. Eventually, she accepted a position at the historically Black Fisk University in 1950, where she taught Etta Zuber Falconer (PhD 1969, Emory University) and Vivienne Malone Mayes (PhD 1966, Texas)—who once commented that it was the presence of Granville that influenced her and others to pursue the PhD. Then Granville began a career at IBM before returning to academe and retiring in Texas. Asked once to summarize her accomplishments, Granville stated: “‘first of all, showing that women can do mathematics.’ Then she added, ‘Being an African-American woman, letting people know we have brains too’” (Young, 1998, p. 212).

Clarence Stephens (PhD 1943), like Blackwell and Granville, has been a faculty member at both HBCUs and predominantly White institutions. Born in rural North Carolina in 1917, he attended segregated elementary schools and an all-Black boarding school, the Harbison Institute, for secondary school. Graduating from Johnson C. Smith College, a historically Black college, he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1941. He is the ninth African American to earn his PhD in mathematics. Starting at Prairie View University, Stephens then began an illustrious career at Morgan State College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1947, followed by a well-documented and equally successful career at State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam (Datta, 1993; Megginson, 2003). Early in his career, he was committed to increasing the number of mathematics majors at Morgan State and began recruiting students from the segregated Black high schools in Baltimore:

There were two high schools in Baltimore: Dun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: “The Substance of Things Hoped For, the Evidence of Things Not Seen”
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Kinships and Communities
• Chapter 3. Navigating the Mason-Dixon Divide
• Chapter 4. “Representing the Race”
• Chapter 5. Flying Home
• Chapter 6. Conclusions
• Appendix A. Methodological Note
• Appendix B. Interview Protocol
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover