We have been told that Jesse Ernest Wilkins, Jr. pops up in two scenes in the film “Oppenheimer” (portrayed by Ronald Auguste), and we will take their word for it, since the eyes here are not as fast as they used to be.
Even though he’s only fleetingly there, he certainly was one of several African American scientists involved in the making of the atomic bomb. This was just one of several notable achievements by Wilkins—at the age of 13, he was the youngest student at the University of Chicago and upon graduation, he was hailed in the national media as “the Negro genius.”
Wilkins was born on November 27, 1923, in Chicago. He was the first of three children of J. Ernest and Lucille (Robinson) Wilkins, both alumni of the University of Chicago.
Along with his academic accomplishments, Wilkins was a baseball player and a champion at table tennis. When not smashing ping-pong balls, he completed his degree in mathematics, earning his Ph.D. at 19 in 1942. He was well into his study of nuclear physics when he began teaching at the Tuskegee Institute, but by 1944, he was back at the University of Chicago, serving as an associate mathematical physicist and then in the Metallurgical Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project.
It was under the tutelage of Arthur Holly Compton and Enrico Fermi that he began researching fissionable nuclear materials, but he was not informed of the group’s ultimate goal until after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. During this period, Wilkins was the co-discoverer or discoverer of several phenomena in physics. With Eugene Wigner, he co-developed the Wigner-Wilkins technique of estimating the distribution of neutron energies in nuclear reactors, essentially finding the basis of how nuclear reactors are designed.
His scientific involvement was quite complex and widespread. By 1974, he was president of the American Nuclear Society. He was the author of numerous scientific papers and played a critical role in recruiting minority students into science, often relating to them the challenges he faced as a Black man in a racist society.
So Wilkins could secure one position after being denied, a white colleague wrote a letter on his behalf, extolling his skills and scientific capabilities. As Edward Teller wrote in the letter, “He is a colored man and since Wigner’s group is moving to ‘x’ it is not possible for him to continue work with the group. I think that it might be a good idea to secure his service for our work.” Thus his inclusion in the Manhattan Project.
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Wilkins returned to the classroom as a student to complete degree work in mechanical engineering from New York University. His sole purpose was to obtain knowledge that would improve communication between mathematicians and nuclear engineers. This armed him with five science degrees.
By 1970, he was a distinguished professor of applied mathematical physics at Howard University, where he helped found the school’s Ph.D. program.
A sabbatical from the school allowed him to participate as a visiting scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory from 1976 to 1977. During the same period, he was the second African American elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
In 1990, Wilkins lived in Atlanta, where he was a distinguished professor of applied mathematics and mathematical physics at Clark-Atlanta University, from which he retired again for the last time, in 2003. Optics, gamma radiation, differential geometry, and integrals were just a sample of the more than 100 scientific papers in his résumé. He had two children by his first wife, Gloria Louise Steward, who died in 1980. Maxine Malone and Vera Wood Anderson were his other marriages. J. Earnest III was his son from his first marriage.
Wilkins died on May 1, 2011, in Fountain Hills, Arizona. He was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery, Cave Creek, Arizona, on May 5.