Providing a sense of balance from week to week in this column, particularly when it comes to a gender matter, isn’t easy, and it is even harder with a subject where women are fewer in number. All of this surfaced during the completion of last week’s profile of Jesse Wilkins. Seeking Black women working in conjunction with the Manhattan Project finds us two important selections: Blanche J. Lawrence and Carolyn B. Parker. There is a scarcity of information about Lawrence and Parker died at 48 from leukemia.
It is unclear where Lawrence was born, but we know it was on June 18, 1920. She graduated from Tuskegee University and married Captain Erwin Lawrence, a Tuskegee Airman who was killed while on a strafing mission. Blanche Lawrence was an excellent student and among her extracurricular activities was membership in a creative dance group, as well as the Physical Education Club.
Her career as a biochemist began as a research assistant in the health division of the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory during the Manhattan Project. After WWII, she continued her career at the Argonne National Laboratory and after four years there, became a junior chemist in 1949. It was during this period that she gained a certain amount of celebrity and was featured in Ebony magazine as one of the nation’s “Atom Scientists.” She died on February 9, 1989.
It’s hard to believe Lawrence and Parker didn’t know each other, although there seems to be no clear evidence they did. Carolyn Beatrice Parker was born November 18, 1917, in Gainesville, Florida. Her father, Julise Augustus Parker, was a doctor and her mother, Delia Ella Murell Parker, was an elementary school teacher. Like most of her five siblings, Parker was attracted to the sciences, and she earned a B.A. in physics and two master’s degrees, one in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1941 and one in physics from MIT 10 years later. She is often deemed the first African American woman to have gained a postgraduate degree in physics; the onset of leukemia ended her pursuit of a doctorate.
From 1943 to 1947, Parker was a physicist on the Dayton Project, the polonium research and development arm of the Manhattan Project. Later, she became an assistant professor of physics at Fisk University. She died on March 17, 1966, in Gainesville amid speculation that it was the contact with radioactive material that led to her death. She was a member of the Institute of Radio Engineers, American Physical Society, Sigma Upsilon Pi, and Delta Sigma Theta. A park and elementary school is named in her honor in Gainesville.